cv-pls politics Unclear How to keep good relationships with two groups, when one wants to force its ambitions on the other?‭ - Monoandale‭ 2019-11-14 01:07:01Z

good morning

what a wonderful day to review some close votes

Good morning. I guess a few people will enjoy a rep bump today.

Torrent of salacious BS questions arriving any minute now

Yep. Although the majority of BS questions are from single-use accounts. They're generally playing for clicks 'n kicks.

@Snow yep.. I just expect that profile to change slightly now people know they can rep-farm pretty easily from it

That should at least lead people to be consistent across their questions though. People are pretty good at calling out conflicting questions from the same users.

true

tbh I don't really have a particular problem with the change - there will probably be a short-lived rep-farming blitz and then the status quo will resume. The retroactive thing was a bit.. weird though

Yeah, it took the data a long time to update and hit the notification triggers and go through whatever workflow happens when people gain reps. I didn't notice much beyond a few Yearling badges suddenly appear.

and I suppose the spectacularly trashy blog post was a bit of Thursday morning entertainment

Yep, and cries of "They're bribing us with reps to make us forget about the horrible stuff!"

@Snow I assume the data is still updating.. I've seen no change from any of my upvoted questions

Do you remember what your rep count was from yesterday? To be honest, I forgot what I had yesterday so I don't know whether it's gone up or not.

I don't think that people are going to get rashes of "+5" notifications, it'll just be a bump of rep and any gained badges.

I've not had the +rep notifications at all - but looking back at the historical reputation changes for the questions they do show +10 now rather than +5 so looks like they have been applied

Yep. Seems fair enough to me.

it's quite symbolic, i guess the intent was to give a "thank you for input" cookie

blog post was tl;dr

@ArthurHavlicek I wouldn't bother reading it.. there's some moments of unintentional hilarity but overall it's not particularly worth reading

"For those of you that are getting new privileges: we ask you to take the responsibility reverently." "reverently"? It sounds like one of those words you pluck out of the air because you can't remember the word you were going to use when you started writing the sentence.

yes that was a classic "don't think you really know what that word means" moment

@Snow I gained some 1.1k from yesterday

not that it matters, 20.1k -> 21.4k makes no difference

@mag Nice. On which site?

here

I gained ~700 on SO, 2.1k on MSE and 1.1k on TWP and ~900 on IPS

I gained a grand total of 90 rep across three sites

but that would be largely a function of the fact that I'm not really an asker

Same with me.

I had some TWP questions but as i've gotten more experienced with the whole SE dynamic I have to ask less because I find more

I'm pretty sure all my SO questions and most of my TWP questions are dupes

I'd rather poke my own eyes out with rusty nails than ask a question on SO

Thats roughly how SO works yeah

99/100 times you find what you're looking for before having to ask

and when you ask you need to spend a lot of time and effort getting the problem statement and mcve just right

@mag I think they're adding the eye-poking option into the new "Ask a question wizard" so you can cut out the middle man

because then you've been looking for so long and haven't found it, so you're invested in wanting to know

either that or they'll give you 100 rep for just asking a question but the catch is you have to read at least three SO blog posts in their entirety before you can hit submit

who cares about rep when asking a question

you want to know the answer first and foremost

so all that pruning and prep to make it a good one is because that makes it more likely someone will answer it correctly. At least for SO, because usually on SO it's a work problem.

I got a couple hundred on SO

not much elsewhere

That's because you know everything and don't need to ask so much.

@Snow I wish.

Haing managed to squeeze about four lives into one lifespan, I have precious few things I wish to know the answer to.

I have the president of my hate-dom being a busy little bee lately.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Do you know why octopii have eight tentacles?

@Snow and that each has it's own separate brain? Yep

two of them are actually legs

and they are technically limbs, not tentacles

albeit flexible ones.

cephalopods fascinate me

Ah, the close happy crew is at it again.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica I voted to close that one. It looks more like it is about floating point math and it's explainations then a workplace problem

possibly would have been better to find a generic "convince boss of technical details" one to dup or edit it down

I personally think the OP is asking the wrong question. The manager might well be correct but isn't communicating the reason. However, the question itself is valid, but the technical detail in here is distracting.

@Snow I think that many people forget that not everyone at TWP is technical

And also many people here are technical and focus on the technical detail rather than the human aspect of the question.

right now it asks specifically how to convince the boss about a specific case of floating point math in programming. That is a bit too narrow and specific for a multi-discipline workplace site, I feel

The close reason as chosen by the community seems somewhat misleading.

but yeah, you could probably strip the code and even the locus of the dispute and have a workable question. But that feels like a major edit that OP ought to make

@mag Pretty much. Personally, I think they should slash question rep to, say, 1 per vote. At least for established sites.

@Snow I know that my answers tend to be of the hard-ass type, and that's deliberate on my part. I'd rather not see other people go through some of the things I have.

@Kaz they increased the question rep... the blog post sanitized the real reason for it.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Yep. I know what you're saying there. In cases like this, people can get trapped into answering the programming question rather than the human side.

@Snow yeah, and that is NOT going to help them with their manager.

Nope. Hence removing the example and concentrating on the issue would get better answers here. And possibly question-votes.

technical ability only gets you so far the interpersonal aspect of work is just as important

frustrating as that may be sometimes

@Snow I managed to save a few questions from the trash heap with some edits doing just that.

@mag yep, at some point, being the "sheldon cooper" counts against you.

@Snow in the end, putting on hold is what that is for, no? You close something, it gets edited into shape (possibly drastically, as would be appropriate here) and then it gets reopened

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica That point is right at the start, in my experience. You have to make a conscious effort to not neglect the interpersonal because being right does you no good when your manager doesn't trust you

@mag in any organization large enough to require an HR department, playing nice will get you much further than skill.

You'd think. But in reality, people tend to walk away from closed questions because they're "low quality". There's only a few folks who put the effort into getting them re-opened.

i'm always teetering between not wanting to change OPs question too much

cause edits that alter meaning significantly are discouraged

@Snow and many people who have their questions closed tend to get peeved, and just walk away

@mag I've never had much of a problem with editing while preserving meaning in here.

I think one of the reason Joe is so popular is that he doesn't get caught up in the minutia of the site.

Personally, I've walked away from any admin of the site. Too much aggravation when all I want to do is help people.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica on IPS, I used to do that, but I still got people getting mad at me because some extraneous nuance not material to answers was removed, so I made it a habit to stick to closing (and reopening if OP does come through and edit)

not that I'm averse to pushback but if OPs generally don't want it, I'll let them deal with it as they feel appropriate

@mag Honestly, I've washed my hand of that site. I find the situation untenable, and I face too much open hostility to want to participate.

I like world building though.

I left a few months (a year?) ago because I can't keep up with the adapting rule set and it starts for feel a bit like wikipedia's kafka trap

maybe again someday

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Joe is pretty awesome in how he supports the site and users without much in the way of fuss. He knows when to walk away.

joe is a bit the jon skeet of the workplace

right most of the time, always high quality, no unnecessary drama and a lot of good content

@Snow Perhaps my greatest weakness is an inability to disengage. It is clearly tied to the autism, as I'm much more able to do it when I am calm, and on the proper dosage of my medication. It's not even an ego thing about admitting I'm wrong, that I can do. What I can't do is let things drop... at least not easily.

When there's more than one person involved, it's worse.

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica I resemble that remark to a lesser extent

@mag you remind me of me at your age. So let me serve as a warning as to what your future may be like ;)

but I've been burned by it so many time online and off that I fought really hard to learn to disengage more

@mag those of us on the spectrum tend to value what is honest, open, blunt, and correct, and we tend to forget that this is a rare attitude

but, then again, I am so rigid, that I drive my cars long after it becomes economically sound to do so because I hate change that much

I spent 15€ to put new soles in 10€ shoes before because I detested the idea of buying new shoes

little idiosyncracies :)

@mag agreed.. I like the concept of the IPS site and I think there's some folks there who are working extremely hard to make what is a difficult subject for an SE site work. Unfortunately there's some utter absurdities, some ever-shifting goalposts and downright hostility there.

@mag I know the feeling.. my aversion to change combined with sensory issues meant when my previous go-to socks became discontinued I had an extremely unpleasant couple of months trying to find a suitable replacement

@motosubatsu Yeah, I had enough when they went into "delete everything" mode, as well as the attitude of a few people. Oh, and I got a 1 week ban, without warning, for voting to reopen too many questions.

No point in participating

@motosubatsu These ones?

@motosubatsu all my socks (and tshirts) are exactly of the same brand and size (and color). It's strange, it takes me a while to find clothing that I'm comfortable in, and adapting takes some weeks, so I always buy a bunch of what I'm wearing. I have 3 new unused jeans of exactly this model, make and size ready for when my 2 current pairs run their course.

@mag all of my socks are the same color. All of my shirts are the same brand, ditto that with my pants (including color)

#autismForTheWin :D I do that too.

but I love those socks @Snow! I'd definitely buy them if I knew they were comfortable.

sometimes it feels like a curse

all these particularities and rituals, a lot of people seem to have no issues deviating from the norm and going with the flow, I get incredibly stressed at that

not to mention piercing headaches from people talking over each other

@mag ear plugs, sun glasses, earbuds, et cet

Personally, I've taken the phrase "weaponized autism" to describe the upside :D

@mag FWIW, Albert Einstein did the same thing

@mag amen to that.. some stuff I can be moderately flexible with but as ridiculous as it sounds I can't wear 90% of the socks out there because the feel of them makes my skin crawl

@mag amen to that.. when I came into the office this morning there were three distinct group conversations going on near my desk. None were particularly loud or obnoxious, just workplace stuff but the combination of them was like an auditory cattle prod

@motosubatsu It's like this every day for me. just behind my desk is a window. Between me and the window are a row of contract project managers who face the window - when they're not talking to each other, they're on teleconference calls. The window of course reflects all the sound back into the room.

@Snow ooof

It's only going to get worse when we get our nice large desks replaced with smaller desks to fit more people into the office.

And we have no idea who these "more people" are.

it all sounds rather ominous

@Snow.... you should enjoy this one....

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica Excellent find! I've printed it out.

@Snow "Eidetic memory" I was working at AT&T when that comic came out, and yes, they were reducing cubicle size.

I'm not sure we'll even have cubicles - we'll just have standard sized desks, barely wide enough to take dual monitors.

@Snow yeah, they did something like that here. The funny thing is that the new layout is in flagrant violation of their own IT security policy. What is on your monitor is not supposed to be visible beyond your work area.

We don't have those rules here.

@Snow IMO, those are sensible policies to have in place. One place I worked, security was so tight that you couldn't even plug in a USB mouse if it wasn't one of theirs. Of course, you also had to go past armed guards (with M-16 rifles) to get in.

@mag My wardrobe is 7 black shirts (5 to use in a week and 2 spares, one to keep in the office and one to keep at home), 2 pairs of black jeans, 7 black t-shirts (I cycle to work), 9 boxers and 10 identical pairs of hiking socks.

@Kaz welcome to the tribe

And 1 tailored suit (black on the outside, electric blue fractals on the inside, still haven't actually worn it yet but there for when I need it).

I'm always thankful that the guys who founded my company also hate suits :)

My boss is literally me (or maybe I'm literally him?), just 20 years older and quite a bit richer.

He begrudgingly wears a suit to board meetings for the insurance company he's also chairman of.

But I've been working with him for 6 years now and I've never seen him in a suit.

@Kaz 12 grey same size same cut tshirts here, 3 different cloth jackets (same model & make & size), 20 or so socks (same model make and size) and 5 pairs of identical jeans

my outfit is always tshirt in the summer and tshirt + cloth jacket in the winter, with jeans

Kilisi Bomb

How are things, folks?

Been a bit disconnected lately

@DarkCygnus Kilisi is perhaps the only person here who can out-snark me, without even trying

Everyone who wants to have fun should go over to meta SE and discuss the current state of affairs

@RichardSaysReinstateMonica I think you are right on that

On other news, I just bought myself a new pair of headphones

^5