I’m all in favour of the OpenBSD mantra here: Shut up and code. People aren’t the same, and you can’t expect (e.g.) autists to share the same views about what’s nice and what’s rude as other persons.

The point I’m trying to make is that nice people won’t help the project by being nice people. IT projects are inherently technical, and that should be the only relevant unit of measurement here.

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 11 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

IT projects almost always have several different "correct" answers, which is why they generally lead to debate or discussion. That's where a code of conduct is needed.

Discussion between "shut up and code" people and everyone else doesn't tend to be a positive place to work without some boundaries. If you want people to volunteer for projects, you need to treat them with a baseline respect, and that baseline needs to be agreed on.

[–] tux0r@feddit.org -5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The baseline in technical projects is “make good products” though.

[–] rainwall@piefed.social 10 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Sure. How?

Seems deceptively simple, but organizing people, especially people of incredibly divergent experiences and histories that may literally only share the traits of "is human" and "can code to varying degrees" is the complex part.

Saying "just do it right" is akin to saying "we dont need test or qa. Just code without bugs."

People are easily as messy as code itself, if not worse. We need some kind of organizing principles to work together, and thats what codes of conduct are.