Have these things ever happened to you?
- You submit a patch, receive a review, and argh, the reviewer is just WRONG!
- You receive a bug that just makes no sense.
- You (the maintainer) and a patch contributor are discussing a proposed fix, and urghhhhh, they just won’t accept your opinion!
If they have, maybe you too have lashed out with an angry comment. I know I have, and I’ve done it recently. Sorry to anyone that this has happened to.
Here’s my proposal (feature request for GitLab / irssi? 😉): if I feel heated when writing a reply, I will take 5 minutes before hitting the send button. I expect when I come back that I’ll look like the bad guy, some re-wording will happen, and the world will become a little bit less bad than it would have.
😠🔥🚒💦😌
Emojis do it right!
I do it all the time 🙂 Although in the good ol days I would be drinking a lot of scotch while doing it. Good times. 🙂
I have received emails that are just so UTTERLY infuriating I have felt compelled to write SOMETHING.
However, I have a rule for such emails. All the recipients fields have to be emptied before I start the response. Blank out To: CC: and Bcc: before any text is written. If anyone else is going to receive this, it will be because I have put those names in at the end. Any CTRL-RETURN keypress will do nothing.
Then I let rip. Explain the fallicies, the mistakes, the incompetence. Show all the flaws in the email, expose the idiocy.
At this point I’ve usually calmed down. There are usually a few points worth keeping from the diatribe I have just typed but most of it is useless invective. Pull the good points out, lose the rest. Structure the response to actually guide the original sender through the material in a better way, add the names back and send it out.
Result: I still have my job!
Does using phrases like “exterminatus” and “burn it with holy fire” in code reviews count?
Yeah I also experience the anger and it’s always good to take a step back. You might also want to consider a Keep Calm sticker nearby. If the anger keeps flaring and you feel bad about it, better seek counseling. It isn’t necessarily bad though, take Torvalds for example. Without his drive to anger, he would have thrown in the towel a long time ago.