@Weng said:

Because in the reality, we were making him choose between his employer's party line and what he likely knew to be good engineering.

Bullshit.

I'm sorry. But bullshit.

Sam was definitely a more polite and more communicative developer than Atwood, but he wasn't a better developer. Remember, the incident that brought this all on-- about having Discourse automatically dismiss unread posts-- Sam was perfectly ok with that "solution". He didn't see the problem until it was pointed out to him by a person external to the Discourse team.

I'm sorry but no.

You know what pisses me off most? I work for a company that stores healthcare information. We have process, we have QA, we have a lot of responsibility, and we have a big-ass government agency just waiting in the wings to assign us huge fines if we screw up even a little bit. Our product also deals with end-users. We have UX people, we do usability testing (not very formal, but hey: doing it at all is noteworthy in 2015), we do long user acceptance testing where we frequently tell the client to move slower because we want to be sure they didn't miss anything when double-checking our work. We write manuals and user guides. We write release notes in great detail. It's all by the book.

You know what that's called? Software engineering. The kind adults do. Not basement-dwelling sweaty anime nerds with their open source bullshit, where none of that process exists, and the only reply to a user who dares to talk to you is "fuck off".

And while I'm proud of the work I do, we live in an IT industry that's so fucked up, upside-down and back-to-front, that people like Jeff Atwood and Sam (probably) make more money than anybody working for my company.