Hi Shane,
Thank you for your opinion on the matter.
(Every thing below is my personal point of view)
> This style of "questioning" works when discussing a piece of
> work, e.g.
some code, or the wording of a standards document. It's effective when
it is clear that we are objectively discussing "the work", and that the
work is separate from "the person" who created the work. Comments in
pull requests can appear brutal at first brush, but no one takes offence
because of the context of the discussion. When I do code reviews, I take
pains to emphasise that things should not be taken personally. It is
human nature to make things personal!
Is it really of your concern if things you say are taken personally?
Should you really ensure that people do not take your code reviews
personally or remedy to it? From my standpoint, people going as far as
taking my code reviews personally shows a lack of professionalism. When
about to step through a piece of code may it be from someone working for
an enterprise or a college student, I try to be as objective and
impartial as possible. I expect the author of the work to understand
that beforehand and it is not of my responsibility to "sugar-coat" my
code reviews to prevent such a thing as hypersensitiveness. Else, it
will be a waste of resources and will counterfeit the doing such an
activity (i.e code reviewing).
> If you actually want to get things done, you engage with Avinash
privately, ask if you could have some of his precious time, maybe invite
him for a cup of coffee and ask him how you can help. I'm sure that he
would be delighted to talk about the activities of the group, the
challenges that he's faced, and his plans and hopes for the coming year.
This is a highly flawed approach. Placing someone out of his/her
original environment in order to have an informal conversation with
him/her does not ensure reliability of information. In other words,
converting a formal approach to an informal approach and expecting a
better flow of reliable information. Moreover, the information shared
during that "private" session can never be used as evidence since the
session is not documented. The moment you try to document such a
session, you defeat your approach's purpose.
Private radio stations are now hosting programmes where the public is
allowed to express their concerns/questions/dilemmas. One of the most
recurring concerns from members of the public is that they are being
ignored. In many cases, there is no documented proof of it where they
contacted an endpoint in an organisation and no answer or bogus
information was given back. In essence, it is safe to assume that the
channel of communication, in that context, was private and could
possibly have started of with a friendly approach from that member of
the public. Still, the end result was unsastifactory which brings us to
the reason why these radio programmes exist. As per my understanding,
they remove the private aspect of the communication and makes it public.
Even these radio programmes face issues like bogus information or no
response. However, in this case, there is a proof.
Private session is only a way of building a personal relationship with
someone for a specific goal (i.e information extraction). The grim side
of it being it's a method to "trick" someone. I do understand you want
make the respondant feel at ease by being in a safe environment but you
are also sandboxing your conversation making it irrelevant to the
public. Moreover, I don't fancy my chance of getting some "private"
time with the ceo of a company, which service I'm paying for, just to
get proofs that things are being done in my best interest. Neither do I
want to "buy" that information from them because it would be a
"corrupted" approach.
Organsations to me are like closed-source applications. In all due
respect, I absolutely don't care about the internals of them. I only
expect an output to an input I give them. Some organisations do not have
an endpoint to send that input to but that does not stop me from trying
to do so and get an output. If ever I suspect the existence of a bug,
I'll have to provide evidence of the input and the output I got. In
retrospect to your suggestion of "private" sessions, this evidence does
not exist as any information obtained cannot be verified (i.e the
respondant can deny the information they gave out or simply deny the
existence of such sessions). On the other hand, they can't deny the
existence of an e-mail on a public mailing list. To add, it is risky to
have a private conversation through e-mail and then make that public as
it can create some privacy concerns (i.e arguing that such information
was not meant to be disclosed). When implying that the conversation will
be in a formal format and public (i.e cc'ing a public mailing list) is
more beneficial on many level (as you saw) versus a friendly private
conversation.
Regards, Mike
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Received on Thu Feb 25 2016 - 08:36:14 PST