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Re: apply to NM? ha!



On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 15:00 +0000, Henning Makholm wrote:
> Scripsit Helen Faulkner <helen_ml_faulkner@yahoo.co.uk>
[...]
> > I do not believe that being thick-skinned enough to cope with people
> > who are very agressive or insulting should be a requirement for
> > involvement in Debian.
> 
> I believe that it *should* be a requirement that one has enough calm
> to most of the time respond to (percieved or actual) aggression and
> insults in a less aggressive and insulting way than the other party
> uses. Otherwise the project will surely die (film at 11!) from runaway
> flamewar escalation.
> 
> If you want to describe that as "thick-skinned enough to cope" (which,
> based on my understanding of English, would not be a bad description),
> then yes, somebody involved in Debian *should* be thick-skinned
> enough to cope.

Indeed. Even if all of us start to behave ourselves and avoid nasty
flamewars (ha! in your dreams! :P), we still have to deal with the
occassional bugreporter of Barbaric Communication School For 1337 People
(the `f**k you, this piece of s***e doesn't work, go fix it or I'll be
REAL angry and how you dare you release such a crap?!??@!!!' kind).

It can help a lot when one can reply to such reports calmly and in a
civilized manner. And a thick skin certainly helps a lot here.

> > Shouldn't we be more interested in someone's technical skills, and
> > their ability to work well with others?
> 
> I'm lost here. It seems that you are arguing that you *don't* want
> "ability to work well with others" (which in my book includes enough
> thick-skinnedness not to escalate flamewars) to count?

Same here.. If we ignore internal agression, one still needs a thick
enough skin (although, a bit thinner as otherwise) to deal with
occassional agression originating from outside (be that a bug report, a
Debian or linux-flaming article somewhere on the net, etc), preferably
calmly, without having ones blood pressure rise to unhealthy heights.

-- 
Gergely Nagy



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