We had a similar situation at our local PHP user group for a while. Someone would present something and it would always lead in to some sort of related by unrelated demo by one of the event organizers.
I remember fondly a guy from Viacom talking about his CDN and how hard it is to maintain internal consistency and how they deploy and everyone was really engaged (it was an amazing presentation, even though he did it with just bash and firefox) and it devolved into this event organizer talking about his Solr install and the conversation basically ceased.
It can be really frustrating when someone is constantly 'that guy.'
Your last sentence is key here. I personally think you need to ask yourself when you have the urge to call someone out "does this add value to the current discussion?". If it does, you should lead in with questions like "Have you thought about..?" or "I don't think your example is quite correct, here's why.." Definitely stating "You're wrong, this is how you should do it" is great way to immediately shut the other person down.
If calling out the person in question doesn't add value to the conversation, save it for a private conversation later. Simply being technically adept is no excuse for poor communication skills.
The speaker apparently wrote a query with a glaring SQL injection issue (the kind we use as example when explaining injection). I wasn't there but it sounds like Yehuda simply explained that it was wrong and showed how Rails has built-in tools to avoid injection. At least I'm assuming from what I gathered here and on twitter.
If you are using my comment to base this on, it was just an example of how context matters. I've updated my comment to make it clear that it was an example. Apologies.
Wow. A post about etiquette that calls someone out by name, with an insulting headline?
Face-to-face is the right channel for this sort of pointed criticism. Failing that, email might work. To pass the lesson along to the larger community, leave the specific names out of it - talk about "a big name in the community" who behaved badly. People who were there will know who you're talking about, but it doesn't become part of the internet paper trail.
I don't know. I'm not coming down on either side, but I can see the point that this Katz fellow didn't extend the same courtesy to the poor speaker. An embarrassing taste of their own medicine might do the trick.
We can't be nice to people who aren't nice all the time.
I agree with your point about face=to-face or direct communication first. Barring that not accomplishing anything however, I'm not so sure I agree with the last part anymore. I used to, fully. However, after years of watching this 'accepted etiquette' go on and on, i've realized the ones who've done the stupid thing, keep on doing it - with new people none the wiser.
Why not call someone out by name? This person seems that they'd have no problem doing so if it came to that. I'm honestly tired of the wise, polite people keeping their mouths shut because it's rude, while the rude people never stop being idiots.
Zed was right to an extent. I feel if you take the Python and Ruby communities and split them into two groups (superstars and people who think they're superstars), you'll find that Ruby superstars are quite... eccentric while Python superstars are helpful, insightful people.
However, go to #python and ask a question? You'll be treated like a total idiot by a bunch of mediocre programmers who think they're Guido himself.
Every community has its annoying parts, it all depends on the skill level.
Have you considered that there are posts on Hacker News that aren't meant for your personal consumption and enjoyment but that may be of interest to others? As well, have you considered that this has as much to do with general interpersonal relationships as it does with Ruby?
This feels like the intersection of a technology problem and a communication problem. What do you do when someone says something that is technically wrong? I understand not wanting to embarrass someone else, but I also see Yehuda's point of view. People will be worse off if they do bad things in their code, so the best time to correct misinformation may have been right then, when everyone who heard it was still all together.
Maybe it could have been done with more tact, but I don't see it as heckling. You can attack someone's ideas without attacking the person. The less tied up you are to being right, the more open you are to criticism taking it personally, the more likely you are to learn something new.
Feels more like a problem of simple manners to me.
The easy and proper thing to do for Katz is simply take notes and wait until the end of the presentation to make his counter points during the q/a session.
Interrupting someone in the middle of a presentation just makes it harder for the speaker to continue. The speaker is going to be more flustered and the flow and presentation will quickly degrade because he/she is going to be second guessing everything that he/she was going to say. For some speakers, one heckle turns them from an OK speaker to a bumbling mess.
It's also going to have a chilling effect on the user group. Who's going to want to volunteer to do a presentation after this?
There are some people going to such meetings that have the habit of contradicting the speaker in the hope of sounding smart. Yehuda Katz has proved that he's smart already and I hope he ain't one of those people.
That said, this story doesn't have the right context, ignoring the actual talk and the actual arguments brought by Katz. Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored - and this is very unlike the Dale Carnegie story quoted in the article, because such presentations are attended by people that want to learn something.
I have been feeling embarrassed myself when other people corrected me in public and it feels awful, however it's a lot better to accept and acknowledge valid criticism and valid counter arguments and actually thank the person that stood up to you, because you know, you learned something new.
> Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored
Still not appropriate behavior. Ideally, you bring up your point, have a brief discussion, and then, if you still feel the speaker is wrong, you take it offline. You don't have to pretend to agree with him or her -- you can say, "Well, I disagree, but let's talk more about it when you're done."
Getting criticized in public is like getting criticized in private - you feel bad, you swallow hard and eventually you understand it's for your own good.
Unless, however, it is done this way. You are being basically made fun of in front of an audience. Instead of using constructive criticism and manners to show he had a better way to do things, Yehuda took the bully stance and made the speaker look bad - much worse than he should.
I suppose you need to say up front what the expectations for the meeting are. I give and sit on presentations from other researchers, and I have even come up with a metric to express how many questions there are: MTTI, mean time to interruption. I have been in presentations with an MTTI of 1 minute. A typical presentation has an MTTI of about 5 minutes. A presentation with "few" interruptions has an MTTI of about 15 minutes.
Generally, questions come in three classes: clarification ("I'm not sure I understand, can you explain..."), discussion ("Have you considered extending this to..."), and criticism ("I think there is a problem with this approach..."). In an academic setting, all are welcome unless otherwise stated. (Sometimes we say no discussion and critical questions because of time limitations.)
However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.
So, simply, you need to let your audience know what the format is, because had I been in your audience, I may have asked questions, too.
> Katz: Wait, why are you doing it that way? You should be doing it this way.
[...]
Katz plugged in his own laptop, and proceeded to redo the demo.
That's not the behavior of someone who is curious. It's the behavior of someone who thinks they know better. Whether or not they actually do, the point of the article is to not attempt to show them up in front of everyone else.
I'm separating "Why are you doing it that way?" from "Move over" because I see them as two separate things. There is also a spectrum of first.
"You should be doing it this way" is on the rude side of what is acceptable in academic circles. That is, people will think you're rude for phrasing it that way, but the content of what you said is legit. A more polite version is "Did you consider doing it this other way? If so, why did you choose your way?"
What I'm saying is even if the content is legit, you don't interrupt someone during their presentation. User smacktoward says this rather well further down in this submission's comments:[0]
> "Was Katz right?" is not the most important part. It's arguably not even relevant. If someone is presenting, and they say something that's incorrect, there are better ways to deal with it than pushing them off the platform and announcing that the Real Genius has arrived.
I also see and give a lot of academic presentations, and I'm not aware of any venue that encourages someone from the audience to commandeer a talk. "Let's take this offline" is so common as to be a cliche, and if the speaker got flustered enough to get caught up in it, a decent moderator steps and makes that call. There are many reasons for this. One is that it's simply the polite thing to do. Another is that the audience may want to hear the talk rather than whatever particular point you're hung up on being the only topic of conversation. Yet another is that it's very unlikely that the speaker has absolutely nothing of value to contribute, so it's in everyone's best interest that emotions have a chance to cool down a bit rather than the speaker deciding he's never going to talk to that asshole from the crowd again.
We weren't at this meetup of course, but it very much sounds like that's what should have happened here and didn't.
I'd also point out to anyone thinking that being right is an excuse for this sort of behavior that people will remember you being an ass long after they've forgotten you being right.
You might have missed this sentence: However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.
This appears to be a perspective issue. The writer took it as rude without mentioning the most important part:
Was Katz right?
We need more context, and we need less emotional argument. If the original presenter could effectively support his position then he would not have left the stage. And I would hope that Katz would not commit such a social atrocity without a very, very good reason. I don't find it hard to believe that the actual story is much more tame and logical than the author of this article thinks it is.
> If the original presenter could effectively support his position then he would not have left the stage.
I don't think so. They may not have been seasoned public speakers like Katz, so having someone outright argue with them during their presentation could have been especially unnerving.
"Was Katz right?" is not the most important part. It's arguably not even relevant. If someone is presenting, and they say something that's incorrect, there are better ways to deal with it than pushing them off the platform and announcing that the Real Genius has arrived.
I can think of two right off the top of my head:
1) Wait until they've finished, then pose your correction in the form of a question to them and allow them to answer. This lets them save face (since you're not outright correcting them, you're just asking for clarification), gives them the chance to correct themselves in case they just misspoke or were misunderstood, and avoids the risk of your correction of the one incorrect point overwhelming the other, presumably correct, points the speaker made.
2) When the session is over, approach the organizer of the user group and offer to make your own presentation on the subject, in which you'll give the correct information, at the next meeting. If you're concerned that people will miss the point, add a subtitle like "A Response to Presenter X" to the name of the presentation.
> If the original presenter could effectively support his position then he would not have left the stage.
In the world of actual human beings, this is not true. People are quite easily driven to the margins by bullies who are louder and more strident than they are, even if their argument is 100% correct. Lawyers even have a saying for it: "If the law is against you, bang on the facts. If the facts are against you, bang on the law. If both are against you, bang on the table."
Answering that question doesn't really get you very far.
Katz could have politely disagreed without taking over the presentation.
Katz could have taken the author aside afterwards and shared his perspective.
Katz could have offered to assist with a revised presentation.
There are all sorts of ways to politely and tactfully correct someone. Doing it in the manner described in the original article doesn't seem like the best approach.
It's basic etiquette to not interrupt someone in that manner if they have the podium. Even if he was right, he should've waited. Real douche move to do that to someone's entire presentation.
I'm all for speaking your mind in public, and standing up for an opinion, but timing is everything. Yehuda Katz has poor timing.
I think this post paints a one-sided picture of the worst sort.
The user groups I've been to are very informal and relaxed. "The Podium" may have just been "the chair at a table next to the projector" and "redoing the demo" may have been borne from a group discussion where there was enough interest from everyone (possibly including the speaker) for Yehuda to plug in and demo his way. Yehuda is well known for his contributions, I can't imagine any group not being interested in what he had to say on the matter.
We don't know and we shouldn't judge based on this incredibly vague and incendiary post from a bystander. It would hold more merit if it was at least the original speaker complaining.
You read ONE side of the story. Maybe the programmer ended up butt-hurt that someone corrected him and wanted revenge. In any case, don't use such strange language until BOTH sides of the affair have provided their recollection of the events.
If he was at a local user group in the first place, then I'd say his timing was awesome, cause despite his obvious rockstar status in the community, he still spends time helping and creating at the base level, and he should be thanked for that.
This is a touchy subject. I think this kind of behavior is very counterproductive and we (programmers) seem to do it a lot. It's something that needs to be talked about and fixed. Miguel de Icaza wrote a great blog post about "well-actuallys" a year ago and it's definitely worth reading: http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
That being said, it makes me uncomfortable that an article called "Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting" near the top of HN, especially because he seems to have become a bit of a punching bag lately (see Rails.app). I really wish we as a community spent less time dragging people down, especially ones who contribute so much great code.
This shouldn't be about Yehuda. This should be about all of us being nicer and better people. It's sad to see an opportunity for discussion be used to bring down one person.
I totally agree. What doesn't get mentioned in the OP is just how incorrect the presentation was. If I was a ruby newbie, I'd want someone to stand up and say why the presentation, which was surely being presented as truth, was actually incorrect. In addition, publicly berating Yehuda seems really pointless given his huge contributions to our community.
I think programmers generally care too much about correctness at the expense of feelings, community, and personal relationships. Very often correcting someone is really about showing how smart you are. While I wasn't at the event in the article, it certainly seems that Yehuda could have been doing that, and he shouldn't have done it. I just don't think this is a productive way to fix the problem.
I think programmers generally care too much about correctness at the expense of feelings, community, and personal relationships.
Maybe. Or, maybe like other engineers we care more about having things that work than your hurt feelings. In Inviting Disaster [1], Chiles talks about how the most successful engineering cultures don't cover up mistakes. They expose them and correct them at the earliest possible instance. This does sometimes require people to have a thick skin. It's not comfortable to realize that you're wrong. But, frankly, I'd much rather be correct than comfortable.
Of course, this doesn't mean that you should personally attack the person who's wrong. But, from the article, that's exactly what happened. Ms. Selle doesn't say that Mr. Katz personally attacked the presenter. She just said that he questioned the presenter's methods and approach. I think that's entirely valid. I see it at scientific conferences all the time.
I do agree that interrupting the presenter was uncalled for. Mr. Katz should have reserved his questions until the presenter was done speaking. But I don't think he was incorrect in asking the questions that he did.
This isn't a simple binary decision of "yes, correct the presenter" or "no, don't correct the presenter"".
What you're ignoring is that Katz could have timed his criticism better. Katz could have simply been polite and let the speaker finish the presentation and then do a point-by-point breakdown of what his issues were with the talk AFTER the presentation was done.
The audience in this case will still get the facts, so to speak.
I don't know what the motivation of the speaker was to give the talk, but usually these presentations are well intentioned. Sometimes people just pick a topic they don't know about, do some research and then present their findings, as a means of learning themselves. We don't know what the situation was here. In any case, just let them finish, and then correct them. Is that so hard?
I do it a lot also. I try to catch myself, but I only succeed part of the time.
One of the best things I've done was giving it a name thanks to Miguel's blog post. With a name, others can call me out for doing it ("did you just well-actually me?") and I can also call myself out ("sorry, that was a well-actually").
Agreed, this article would have been more effective if the author didn't disclose who he was talking about, and perhaps emailed Mr. Katz privately if he had a problem with his behaviour.
I wasn't at the meeting. I could have gone, but decided not to.
The only reason I can find for the OP to explicitly call out Yehuda is so that maybe he'll actually read the article and consider the advice it contains. If the article's intent was to bring attention to this type of behavior, then mission accomplished.
I think the OP wishes she had taken a less passive approach to this when considering the sequence of events in retrospect. Sometimes, it's hard to be "in the moment", and only afterwards do you wish you said/did things differently.
Truthfully, I wish she had said something about this to Yehuda right at the meeting, but after it was all said and done and not in front of everyone. However, I don't know how he would have taken it. I could see the situation getting uglier at that point. Hopefully, he can/will learn from this for the future. No one is beyond criticism. We all have things we could be better at.
I agree.
I find it ironic that a post that attempts tell us all how to be kinder to each other and invokes the words of "How to win friends" would call someone out by name in a public forum.
Even if the author was doing it to "make sure that he saw it so you could teach him a lesson", just saying "Last night at Philly.rb, a guy was giving a presentation on meta programming and he was rudely interrupted by another programmer. Lets talk about why this kind of behavior is bad" would have been enough. It would have been a good thing for all of us that have the same tendency to hear, and wycats could have seen it and said "oh, my bad, I can see how that wasn't very nice" without being called out infront of his peers.
I think this is good. If you give a presentation, you should expect feedback. It's not "people skills" to sit there and let people be grossly misinformed, that's "laziness".
A problem with programmers is that we don't always see that being right isn't necessarily justification for any and all corrective action that you might take.
You can be right and do nothing, you can be right and hear the person out before quietly suggesting some alternatives people might want to look at, you can be right and ask their permission to talk a little about the subject.
Sadly some people think that just being right gives you carte blanche but that's rarely true. I don't think anyone is objecting to the existence of discussion or correction here, more the form it took which, if the account is accurate (which it may not be), was right at the "rarely acceptable" end of the spectrum.
I believe that correcting people in public is rarely effective. In this situation, if I knew a "better" way to do it, correcting the speaker & hijacking the preso is not likely to produce positive results. First, people will focus more on me hijacking the preso than whatever it is I'm trying to say. Second, even if I successfully communicate my "better" idea and save a room full of programmers from a bad habit, I'm not giving them the judgement necessary to avoid the next programming mistake they'll make. Lastly, I have no interest in being right if it means drawing the wrong kind of attention to myself on Hacker News.
It does make a good story though, and it's pretty good PR if you're trying to be infamous :)
Well, actually, a better title would be "Why you should invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting." A user group meeting is the perfect place for lively conversation and free, unfiltered exchanges of ideas.
Even without knowing any of the context that prompted Yehuda to intervene so forcefully, there's a strong probability, based on his remarkably proficient community involvement, that he was making a good point. Would remaining quiet and letting the speaker present his code to a much larger audience at a conference be better?
What's more important? People feeling good about themselves, or people learning? Not that those options are mutually exclusive, but it makes no sense to sacrifice the latter for the sake of the former.
At the highest levels, in academia, business, and the arts, the sort of behavior Yehuda exhibited is completely acceptable.
If you respect the discipline/art/science enough, then you value truth over the ego of some lesser being.
People who dislike the conflict in these kinds of interactions are also inclined to dislike conflict on the editorial page, preferring instead bland "objective" writing.
The thing is, nothing is objective and the best way for the audience to view the truth is by observing the conflict and drawing its own conclusion.
And yeah, Yehuda is one of the best programmers most of us would ever sit in a room with... and thus he would find improvements to nearly anyone's code. To view this as a bad thing and to prefer polite ignorance doesn't seem like the best approach.
There may have also been benefits to the presenter's approach (maybe simplicity?) If you look at Yehuda's refactoring of Rails, there is tons of insight but also significantly more abstraction, which in some cases makes things less obvious. So the presenter should have been able to defend his/her approach at least on some basis.
Just because he's the best programmer in the room doesn't excuse his horrible and unacceptable behavior. He this type of behavior goes unchallenged and is allowed to flourish, then many people will lose a voice. I think that would be tragic.
I think the solution is for people to feel comfortable defending their approach OR admitting they were wrong, and realizing that the goal for everyone is learning, not being right.
Yehuda may have spent hours, months, or years coming up with the insights he shared, so of course he's going to feel strongly about wanting to prevent others from wasting the time the way he did.
If he felt so strongly about preventing others wasting time then wouldn't he have been better putting them forward in a diplomatic way that didn't embarrass the presenter (who was as a result likely to be defensive and therefore unlikely to learn) and alienate some members of the audience (and who now think he's a dick and are probably less likely to learn from him)?
Yehuda's approach if accurately described was as much about being right as about others learning. Confrontation is rarely a good teaching technique so I'm not clear why you justify his behaviour as in some way enhancing that goal.
You've set up a false dichotomy between "polite ignorance" and mean-spirited correction.
I don't think that the OP is suggesting that Yehuda shouldn't have corrected the presenter, but that he should have done it in polite way, i.e. "Have you considered doing it this way instead." People (like the presenter) are far more likely to respond positively and learn from someone who "teaches" rather than someone who ridicules that person for their stupidity.
> the sort of behavior Yehuda exhibited is completely acceptable
Is it acceptable or is it tolerated? There are polite and impolitic ways of handling any situation where you need to explain why or how someone has erred. Expending the energy to do it in a way that doesn't make you seem like an asshole tends to be better because it makes people want to work with you.
Also, on a somewhat related note, I have personally found that the people who are rudest at providing criticism tend to be the ones most incapable of taking criticism, regardless of their capacity or skill in any subject matter.
You present a false dichotomy. It's possible to correct without belittling. The truth and tact are not alternatives, they can co-exist with no problems.
You don't have to pick the truth or "the ego of some lesser being", they can be fine together with no problem at all. "Conflict" and the assessment of alternative views is entirely possible without one party giving another a kicking.
And "some lesser being"? For the love of God get over yourself.
For me, this could go either way. When doing demos to explain a concept (such as metaprogramming) in a straight forward manner, you tend to do things that are easier to do other ways. It would be extremely annoying to have someone say there are easier ways to do that. Your demo isn't showing best practices for a piece of code, but using the code as a stepping stone for the code later.
Local users groups are good places to get decent critiques of your presentation before you take it on the road (bigger conference). The people are generally local and you've seen them before. Smart critiques are good for you and your code. I cannot imagine having audience participation banned at an user group.
The problem here is that and "outsider" came in and basically took apart a presenter brick-by-brick. From the writing of this one side, it seems like the presenter was trying to articulate a concept.
Gods yes. I was at a conference with an older gentleman who interrupted every talk he was at, including the keynote. When he tried it with me I ignored him and kept on talking, because he was rude and out of line. It still wasn't fun, but at least he didn't bother me anymore.
We should be encouraging people to give talks so we can hear about new and different things. If you don't like the talk it's easy to leave: if you intimidate the speaker into not presenting all you've done is be a bully.
If Yehuda cared enough about what I was talking about to pull me up on getting things wrong, I'd be pretty chuffed (after some initial embarrassment sure, but I'd get over it).
There's nothing at all "obnoxious" about a leading practitioner in a field correcting someone at an informal meeting. The people complaining about this seem petty and unappreciative.
This isn't the only time Yehuda Katz has bogarted a talk.
I listen to the Javascript Jabber podcast. One talk was on Backbone. Jeremy Ashkenas was a guest, and I was really looking forward to listening to it. Yehuda was also on the call as a host.
Throughout the call Yehuda repeatedly interrupted and contradicted Jeremy. He would go off on tangents for several minutes, talking about his own work. The main host tried to re-direct the conversation but Yehuda was consistently interrupting. Apart from him not having good manners as a host, I felt like Yehuda really got in the way of my learning more about Backbone. He kind of ruined that podcast for me.
And I might not be alone. Ever since a few shows after that episode he hasn't returned to Javascript Jabber.
Sometimes people don't know how they're perceived until public reactions like these. I hope this helps him understand more about himself and how he affects others.
I heard that episode as well and was dismayed by Yehuda's lack of impulse control and disrespect for the speaker. But I continue to watch Yehuda's work closely - the dude is a programming athlete.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI remember fondly a guy from Viacom talking about his CDN and how hard it is to maintain internal consistency and how they deploy and everyone was really engaged (it was an amazing presentation, even though he did it with just bash and firefox) and it devolved into this event organizer talking about his Solr install and the conversation basically ceased.
It can be really frustrating when someone is constantly 'that guy.'
You don't want attendees, who don't know any better, to adopt really bad practices. For example, what if this was the context:
Although even here there's a right and a wrong way to approach this.Face-to-face is the right channel for this sort of pointed criticism. Failing that, email might work. To pass the lesson along to the larger community, leave the specific names out of it - talk about "a big name in the community" who behaved badly. People who were there will know who you're talking about, but it doesn't become part of the internet paper trail.
We can't be nice to people who aren't nice all the time.
Why not call someone out by name? This person seems that they'd have no problem doing so if it came to that. I'm honestly tired of the wise, polite people keeping their mouths shut because it's rude, while the rude people never stop being idiots.
The only thing I took away is: don't waste energy reading this.
However, go to #python and ask a question? You'll be treated like a total idiot by a bunch of mediocre programmers who think they're Guido himself.
Every community has its annoying parts, it all depends on the skill level.
That means that our internal bickering can be submitted to HN more easily. Stop upvoting it.
http://tirania.org/blog/archive/2011/Feb-17.html
Maybe it could have been done with more tact, but I don't see it as heckling. You can attack someone's ideas without attacking the person. The less tied up you are to being right, the more open you are to criticism taking it personally, the more likely you are to learn something new.
The easy and proper thing to do for Katz is simply take notes and wait until the end of the presentation to make his counter points during the q/a session.
Interrupting someone in the middle of a presentation just makes it harder for the speaker to continue. The speaker is going to be more flustered and the flow and presentation will quickly degrade because he/she is going to be second guessing everything that he/she was going to say. For some speakers, one heckle turns them from an OK speaker to a bumbling mess.
It's also going to have a chilling effect on the user group. Who's going to want to volunteer to do a presentation after this?
That said, this story doesn't have the right context, ignoring the actual talk and the actual arguments brought by Katz. Maybe the mistakes done by the speaker were too great to be ignored - and this is very unlike the Dale Carnegie story quoted in the article, because such presentations are attended by people that want to learn something.
I have been feeling embarrassed myself when other people corrected me in public and it feels awful, however it's a lot better to accept and acknowledge valid criticism and valid counter arguments and actually thank the person that stood up to you, because you know, you learned something new.
Still not appropriate behavior. Ideally, you bring up your point, have a brief discussion, and then, if you still feel the speaker is wrong, you take it offline. You don't have to pretend to agree with him or her -- you can say, "Well, I disagree, but let's talk more about it when you're done."
Unless, however, it is done this way. You are being basically made fun of in front of an audience. Instead of using constructive criticism and manners to show he had a better way to do things, Yehuda took the bully stance and made the speaker look bad - much worse than he should.
Generally, questions come in three classes: clarification ("I'm not sure I understand, can you explain..."), discussion ("Have you considered extending this to..."), and criticism ("I think there is a problem with this approach..."). In an academic setting, all are welcome unless otherwise stated. (Sometimes we say no discussion and critical questions because of time limitations.)
However, what is never acceptable is someone commandeering the presentation and using it to talk about their own thing. Moderators will step in if it starts devolving like that.
So, simply, you need to let your audience know what the format is, because had I been in your audience, I may have asked questions, too.
> Speaker: Talk talk talk talk. Talk talk talk? Demo demo demo.
> Katz: Wait, why are you doing it that way? You should be doing it this way.
[...]
Katz plugged in his own laptop, and proceeded to redo the demo.
That's not the behavior of someone who is curious. It's the behavior of someone who thinks they know better. Whether or not they actually do, the point of the article is to not attempt to show them up in front of everyone else.
"You should be doing it this way" is on the rude side of what is acceptable in academic circles. That is, people will think you're rude for phrasing it that way, but the content of what you said is legit. A more polite version is "Did you consider doing it this other way? If so, why did you choose your way?"
> "Was Katz right?" is not the most important part. It's arguably not even relevant. If someone is presenting, and they say something that's incorrect, there are better ways to deal with it than pushing them off the platform and announcing that the Real Genius has arrived.
[0]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3832936
We weren't at this meetup of course, but it very much sounds like that's what should have happened here and didn't.
I'd also point out to anyone thinking that being right is an excuse for this sort of behavior that people will remember you being an ass long after they've forgotten you being right.
no, you absolutely do not. the onus is absolutely on the speaker here.
Gist that someone else recaptured here: https://gist.github.com/1893359
Was Katz right?
We need more context, and we need less emotional argument. If the original presenter could effectively support his position then he would not have left the stage. And I would hope that Katz would not commit such a social atrocity without a very, very good reason. I don't find it hard to believe that the actual story is much more tame and logical than the author of this article thinks it is.
I don't think so. They may not have been seasoned public speakers like Katz, so having someone outright argue with them during their presentation could have been especially unnerving.
I can think of two right off the top of my head:
1) Wait until they've finished, then pose your correction in the form of a question to them and allow them to answer. This lets them save face (since you're not outright correcting them, you're just asking for clarification), gives them the chance to correct themselves in case they just misspoke or were misunderstood, and avoids the risk of your correction of the one incorrect point overwhelming the other, presumably correct, points the speaker made.
2) When the session is over, approach the organizer of the user group and offer to make your own presentation on the subject, in which you'll give the correct information, at the next meeting. If you're concerned that people will miss the point, add a subtitle like "A Response to Presenter X" to the name of the presentation.
> If the original presenter could effectively support his position then he would not have left the stage.
In the world of actual human beings, this is not true. People are quite easily driven to the margins by bullies who are louder and more strident than they are, even if their argument is 100% correct. Lawyers even have a saying for it: "If the law is against you, bang on the facts. If the facts are against you, bang on the law. If both are against you, bang on the table."
Answering that question doesn't really get you very far.
Katz could have politely disagreed without taking over the presentation.
Katz could have taken the author aside afterwards and shared his perspective.
Katz could have offered to assist with a revised presentation.
There are all sorts of ways to politely and tactfully correct someone. Doing it in the manner described in the original article doesn't seem like the best approach.
I'm all for speaking your mind in public, and standing up for an opinion, but timing is everything. Yehuda Katz has poor timing.
The user groups I've been to are very informal and relaxed. "The Podium" may have just been "the chair at a table next to the projector" and "redoing the demo" may have been borne from a group discussion where there was enough interest from everyone (possibly including the speaker) for Yehuda to plug in and demo his way. Yehuda is well known for his contributions, I can't imagine any group not being interested in what he had to say on the matter.
We don't know and we shouldn't judge based on this incredibly vague and incendiary post from a bystander. It would hold more merit if it was at least the original speaker complaining.
If he was at a local user group in the first place, then I'd say his timing was awesome, cause despite his obvious rockstar status in the community, he still spends time helping and creating at the base level, and he should be thanked for that.
That being said, it makes me uncomfortable that an article called "Why you shouldn't invite Yehuda Katz to your user group meeting" near the top of HN, especially because he seems to have become a bit of a punching bag lately (see Rails.app). I really wish we as a community spent less time dragging people down, especially ones who contribute so much great code.
This shouldn't be about Yehuda. This should be about all of us being nicer and better people. It's sad to see an opportunity for discussion be used to bring down one person.
Let's be nice.
Maybe. Or, maybe like other engineers we care more about having things that work than your hurt feelings. In Inviting Disaster [1], Chiles talks about how the most successful engineering cultures don't cover up mistakes. They expose them and correct them at the earliest possible instance. This does sometimes require people to have a thick skin. It's not comfortable to realize that you're wrong. But, frankly, I'd much rather be correct than comfortable.
Of course, this doesn't mean that you should personally attack the person who's wrong. But, from the article, that's exactly what happened. Ms. Selle doesn't say that Mr. Katz personally attacked the presenter. She just said that he questioned the presenter's methods and approach. I think that's entirely valid. I see it at scientific conferences all the time.
I do agree that interrupting the presenter was uncalled for. Mr. Katz should have reserved his questions until the presenter was done speaking. But I don't think he was incorrect in asking the questions that he did.
[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Inviting-Disaster-Lessons-From-Technol...
EDIT: accidentally forgot link
What you're ignoring is that Katz could have timed his criticism better. Katz could have simply been polite and let the speaker finish the presentation and then do a point-by-point breakdown of what his issues were with the talk AFTER the presentation was done.
The audience in this case will still get the facts, so to speak.
I don't know what the motivation of the speaker was to give the talk, but usually these presentations are well intentioned. Sometimes people just pick a topic they don't know about, do some research and then present their findings, as a means of learning themselves. We don't know what the situation was here. In any case, just let them finish, and then correct them. Is that so hard?
One of the best things I've done was giving it a name thanks to Miguel's blog post. With a name, others can call me out for doing it ("did you just well-actually me?") and I can also call myself out ("sorry, that was a well-actually").
The only reason I can find for the OP to explicitly call out Yehuda is so that maybe he'll actually read the article and consider the advice it contains. If the article's intent was to bring attention to this type of behavior, then mission accomplished.
I think the OP wishes she had taken a less passive approach to this when considering the sequence of events in retrospect. Sometimes, it's hard to be "in the moment", and only afterwards do you wish you said/did things differently.
Truthfully, I wish she had said something about this to Yehuda right at the meeting, but after it was all said and done and not in front of everyone. However, I don't know how he would have taken it. I could see the situation getting uglier at that point. Hopefully, he can/will learn from this for the future. No one is beyond criticism. We all have things we could be better at.
Even if the author was doing it to "make sure that he saw it so you could teach him a lesson", just saying "Last night at Philly.rb, a guy was giving a presentation on meta programming and he was rudely interrupted by another programmer. Lets talk about why this kind of behavior is bad" would have been enough. It would have been a good thing for all of us that have the same tendency to hear, and wycats could have seen it and said "oh, my bad, I can see how that wasn't very nice" without being called out infront of his peers.
You can be right and do nothing, you can be right and hear the person out before quietly suggesting some alternatives people might want to look at, you can be right and ask their permission to talk a little about the subject.
Sadly some people think that just being right gives you carte blanche but that's rarely true. I don't think anyone is objecting to the existence of discussion or correction here, more the form it took which, if the account is accurate (which it may not be), was right at the "rarely acceptable" end of the spectrum.
It does make a good story though, and it's pretty good PR if you're trying to be infamous :)
Even without knowing any of the context that prompted Yehuda to intervene so forcefully, there's a strong probability, based on his remarkably proficient community involvement, that he was making a good point. Would remaining quiet and letting the speaker present his code to a much larger audience at a conference be better?
What's more important? People feeling good about themselves, or people learning? Not that those options are mutually exclusive, but it makes no sense to sacrifice the latter for the sake of the former.
If you respect the discipline/art/science enough, then you value truth over the ego of some lesser being.
People who dislike the conflict in these kinds of interactions are also inclined to dislike conflict on the editorial page, preferring instead bland "objective" writing.
The thing is, nothing is objective and the best way for the audience to view the truth is by observing the conflict and drawing its own conclusion.
And yeah, Yehuda is one of the best programmers most of us would ever sit in a room with... and thus he would find improvements to nearly anyone's code. To view this as a bad thing and to prefer polite ignorance doesn't seem like the best approach.
There may have also been benefits to the presenter's approach (maybe simplicity?) If you look at Yehuda's refactoring of Rails, there is tons of insight but also significantly more abstraction, which in some cases makes things less obvious. So the presenter should have been able to defend his/her approach at least on some basis.
Yehuda may have spent hours, months, or years coming up with the insights he shared, so of course he's going to feel strongly about wanting to prevent others from wasting the time the way he did.
Yehuda's approach if accurately described was as much about being right as about others learning. Confrontation is rarely a good teaching technique so I'm not clear why you justify his behaviour as in some way enhancing that goal.
I don't think that the OP is suggesting that Yehuda shouldn't have corrected the presenter, but that he should have done it in polite way, i.e. "Have you considered doing it this way instead." People (like the presenter) are far more likely to respond positively and learn from someone who "teaches" rather than someone who ridicules that person for their stupidity.
This sounds better if you just say
> value truth over the ego
If the discussion is about someone being a lesser being, you're no longer talking about truth.
Is it acceptable or is it tolerated? There are polite and impolitic ways of handling any situation where you need to explain why or how someone has erred. Expending the energy to do it in a way that doesn't make you seem like an asshole tends to be better because it makes people want to work with you.
Also, on a somewhat related note, I have personally found that the people who are rudest at providing criticism tend to be the ones most incapable of taking criticism, regardless of their capacity or skill in any subject matter.
You don't have to pick the truth or "the ego of some lesser being", they can be fine together with no problem at all. "Conflict" and the assessment of alternative views is entirely possible without one party giving another a kicking.
And "some lesser being"? For the love of God get over yourself.
Local users groups are good places to get decent critiques of your presentation before you take it on the road (bigger conference). The people are generally local and you've seen them before. Smart critiques are good for you and your code. I cannot imagine having audience participation banned at an user group.
The problem here is that and "outsider" came in and basically took apart a presenter brick-by-brick. From the writing of this one side, it seems like the presenter was trying to articulate a concept.
This is like complaining that you were corrected by Feynman at your physics club meeting, no?
I listen to the Javascript Jabber podcast. One talk was on Backbone. Jeremy Ashkenas was a guest, and I was really looking forward to listening to it. Yehuda was also on the call as a host.
Throughout the call Yehuda repeatedly interrupted and contradicted Jeremy. He would go off on tangents for several minutes, talking about his own work. The main host tried to re-direct the conversation but Yehuda was consistently interrupting. Apart from him not having good manners as a host, I felt like Yehuda really got in the way of my learning more about Backbone. He kind of ruined that podcast for me.
And I might not be alone. Ever since a few shows after that episode he hasn't returned to Javascript Jabber.
Sometimes people don't know how they're perceived until public reactions like these. I hope this helps him understand more about himself and how he affects others.