“I don’t want to live in a world where someone else is making state management libraries better than we are” — Redux Community
It’s summer, that time of the year where the Sun is present, the temperature increases, people accrue free time, and inspiration strikes. A lot of kids and adults alike will utilize their newfound time and energy to learn to code this summer, and having been a member of the React community for a bit, I’ve had my fair share of sub-par interactions with other developers. If you are a part of a developer community or are aspiring to be a developer, I can offer 6 habits of toxic developers for you to recognize and combat so that you can leave your community better than you found it.
SEA (Search Engine Aversion) 🌊
If you’re part of an online chat room, you understand the agitation of someone blasting your inbox. It’s even worse when you go to read the messages, and they are questions that could be easily solved by googling it. “How do you print something in JavaScript?” Dude. Just google it. People have lives and energy that could be used differently. There’s something called Google that I’d like to introduce you to. It’s a huge, fast, intelligent machine that has the answers to all of your common questions. It’s fast and easily accessible, so instead of relying on humans to serve your need for knowledge, direct those characters to your browser’s search bar instead of #general.
“Are you sure this will work?” 🤔
So you just got help on a complex problem. Your bud sent you some code, and you ask for confirmation that it will work. Don’t do that. He’s not your compiler. Just throw it in the runtime and try it yourself. Your machine will be your only source of truth and you should be comfortable trying different versions of code on your machine instead of relying on other people to confirm things for you. It respects their time and you learn more quickly by doing so.
“Hey there! … hello? … anyone there?” 🙄
This is the equivalent of triple texting your crush with no reply. It’s unadvised. This happens when either you ask a question that can be easily googled and isn’t worth people’s time or people are simply busy (we have lives ya know) and you are extremely patient. Once again, this is a respect issue and it also displays that you are impatient and immature and it will not look good to your peers.
“???” 😤
If you ever type a string that consists of more that one question mark in a row, everyone will hate you. No question. (pun not intended)
Being “Junior” 👶
There’s always debates about job titles, and they’re pretty counter-productive. I cringe every time I hear someone describing tasks as “so Junior” or relating Junior devs to barely competent children that we need to nurture carefully. I’m no old-time developer that was around when Mozilla was first released, but I’d never consider myself a Junior Developer. I’m only 17, but I have a lot to offer. Calling yourself a Junior Developer is stunting your growth as a developer and your confidence as a player in the bigger community. The hierarchy is stupid and keeps new devs from going at it at full speed because they believe that they need to crawl through the ranks to do certain things. Just do it. Don’t let your dreams be memes.
Hive mentality 🐝
The React community has a lot of great developers and thought leaders in their space, but the world doesn’t move to their beat. You have a brain too. For example, a lot of incoming (and existing) React devs seem to apotheosize Dan Abramov. I love his work and respect him as a leader, but your actions don’t have to be confirmed by his movements. This goes for any thought leader that you follow. You have a mind of your own and you should use it to make your own decisions instead of following what someone else says. The React community is getting kind of cultish, and I’m glad that there are people out there like Ryan Florence and Andrè Staltz that remind people not to drink the Kool Aid.
I’m glad you survived this article and I hope you can relate as a witness or perpetrator of some of these habits. We all have room to improve, especially in this digital age where human to human interaction is decreasing rapidly. I hope you take these tidbits of wisdom with you and make better actions in your operations with other developers.
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I feel quiet uncomfortable with "Search engine aversion" being described as "toxic" behavior. In fact I think it's quiet normal behavior for a human being to ask for help.
What's really toxic is showing an attitude of "if you ask something, you are wasting our time" because that can be very demotivating on less experienced people - and is not fair either.
As a matter of fact, the skill to research by bringing tools like Google to good use is something we learned in the course of our life. It's experience that makes us effective in that skill. So being a welcoming community would embrace that this is true and try to be more considerate on less experienced people.
In the end that would serve the developer community, too, since the inexperienced developer of today can be the experienced developer that helps you, tomorrow. This won't happen if people have the feeling that they are not welcome in that community.
And btw. often enough it's a false assumption, too. Even more so if we are talking about an "aversion" like people (we probably don't know a bit) are just lazy asses.
Have to admit, that my experience goes exactly the other way.
People, who are to lazy to simply use the search function in the sap community board and ask the same stuff over and over and over and over again.
If you encounter the fifth "why does my program crash, when I add an entry to a sorted table", you simply stop responding to questions at all. (Or at least, I do).
If you can demonstrate to me, that you spent 5min and tried to search for the answer ("I searched for "sorted crash", but nothing came up"), ok.
Here I can link to a page, that answered the question and explained sorted table and I can also explain, that "sorted table short dump" would have given you that answer, since a crash in sap is often called "short dump". Here I am willing to help. However, the sixth person who simply posts "my program dumped ! Append must be broken"... no... that won't get any response at all... (especially, since "append short dump" would most likely also get you to that one page I would otherwise link.)
Sorry, if you can't be bothered to invest a few min trying to find an answer, I can't be bothered to help out further.
But: if you post: "I saw everywhere, that one should use sorted tabeles instead of standard tables but I don't understand why". Here I would help out and explain. (also, after the fifth such post, I might stop again -.-)
I agree with what you're saying. I think there's a difference between assisting people on message boards and helping out individual community members and teammates. The difference lies in what kind of return you'll see on your coaching and engagement. Answering the same question for 10 different randos has no measurable impact and burns you out because you'll typically never see those 10 people again. Being able to work with one person starting with that question and seeing skill maturation over time (or finding an interesting problem in an underlying system, etc.) is rewarding, and much more interesting to me.
I really appreciate this response -- it was one of the things that popped out to me . There is a lot of information that isn't searchable in a real way, whether it's business processes or topics that tend to draw in a lot of noise in search results.
In addition to the points that you brought up, I think it's important to ask questions like this because for a few reasons:
I agree with your comment, by avoiding google, I mean that a workflow similar to medium.freecodecamp.com/read-searc... would be a lot more productive.
Okay, I'll bite. I'm a Redux maintainer, and I'm very curious and confused what your initial pull quote means:
It is based on a quote from a funny scene from HBO's Silicon Valley show. The original quote is
hence the actor's picture.
This is mainly a joke referring to the Redux community's viewpoint of other state management solutions like mobx.