this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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C suites are now infested with a circle jerk of MBAs, business minded people who dont understand or care about the product or how its made. MBAs are a plague, let the engineers who know a damn thing sit at the table please...
This is why Boeing builds planes whose wings regularly fall off.
As in, it's literally the reason. They replaced all of their engineer managers with business managers who don't understand the process.
Engineers: Hmm, maybe we should get someone with a bit of market knowledge to the table.
MBA: Shit, I have no clue what they're talking about. I need someone who speaks my language.
MBA 2: Man, these engineers really have no clue what we're talking about, huh.
Engineers: removed
Plenty of engineers struggle to care about the right things too though. You can witness this in Linux communities. The engineers will engage in passion-project rewrites of core systems any day of the week over fixing that one annoying UI bug that thousands of users complain endlessly about.
The key part there is that they're not paid. So working on a passion project is all that matters.
As an aside though, those core system rewrites are often undertaken by businesses rather than the individuals. A lot of businesses view Linux as a tool rather than a consumer OS, so the core systems are the only part that matters.
No, it isn’t. That’s not how it worked on the playground as little kids and it isn’t how it works in the open source community.
Think of it like this: if you’re playing by yourself in your own personal sandbox in the back yard of your house, you’re free to do whatever you want with the sandcastles you build. But, as soon as you invite all the neighbourhood kids to join you, it doesn’t matter if you built the biggest sandcastle before anyone else arrived: you’re now in a social environment where social rules and etiquette apply.
If the other kids politely critique the sandcastle and suggest improvements that you don’t agree with (or don’t think are important), then you’re faced with a dilemma: either compromise and work out a way forward that’s satisfactory (if not perfect) for everyone, or ignore them and face a potential breakup of the community as well as the ostracism which tends to follow. Even worse is something like deciding “no, this is my sandbox, everybody get out!”
Now, if you’ve got the foresight to post a sign by the sandbox which lays out all the rules and expectations for participation, then you have a lot better chance of getting everything to work out. But the idea that “this is my passion project” trumps everything else is not gonna fly in basically any community above a handful of people.
So you expect people to work for free on what you think is important, rather than on what they think is important?
A different analogy: I invite you over to a BBQ that I'm throwing. You show up and say you don't want to eat what I'm preparing. You don't want to bring anything or contribute because you can't cook, and I invited you, so it's rude to ask you to contribute and now I owe you food that you want that I'm not interested in making.
You don't want a "community", you want to be provided with high quality low cost software.
Even in your sandbox example: if I'm building a sand castle you don't get to demand I build it the way you want just because I said you could play too. I don't want to build that into the castle. If you want to add that bit, you can do it. I'm sharing by letting you play in my sandbox and that doesn't entitle you to dictate how I play in the sandbox. We can play together, but that doesn't mean I have to do what you want.
Remember that what you're doing under the auspices of "community" is justifying telling other people how they should give you free stuff that takes a lot of work that they don't want to do unpaid in their free time.
Let’s continue with the barbecue analogy. I come to your barbecue and you drop my steak on the ground and then just put it on my plate covered in dirt and tell me “it’s a free steak, if you don’t like dirt on it, then leave!”
See how it works? You don’t want a community, you just want an adoring fanbase for your passion project!
Yeah but that's the thing. You don't have to eat the steak. This isn't just a 5 person bbq, there's tens of thousands of people here that want to have my steak, and I'm the only person cooking in the whole town that isn't burning the whole thing black . There's plenty of food, sorry there's some dirt on that one, but I'm not going to derail the whole event for you. Enjoy the barbecue. You don't like it? Leave. But I don't care about a little dirt on my steak because I still seared it the way I'm proud of and clearly it's better than most of the other steaks around or you and everyone else wouldn't be here.
I'm here to cook steaks because having a barbecue is what I like doing. If I feel like the dirt is a problem, I'll fix it, but I'm trying to make the best steaks possible and to me that means focusing on the cooking, not the dirt that got on yours.
Don't like it? Leave. Wanna bitch at me until I stop cooking? Fine by me. I'll go inside and cook my steaks there.
Out of tens of thousands of people actually visiting, only 1% are actually taking the time to say anything about the dirty steaks. Everyone else is just quietly leaving after seeing the chef shout down a guy for complaining about the dirt, and then throwing his bbq tongs at them!
That's not quite right because we're all getting the exact same thing. I'm giving you a free steak and you're complaining about the cut of meat. Everyone is getting the same cut, and I bought the steak that I'm giving away so I get to pick what I buy. If you don't like it you're more than welcome to bring your own steak and I'll get it on the grill, or pay me to get you what you want, or hope that I remember to grab one for you the next time. You're not entitled to a free steak though.
Even backing up and looking at your interpretation as you presented it: you're complaining that your free steak got ruined and asking for a new one. You might not always get a new gift just because the one given to you went wrong.
Sorry you didn't get a free steak. Do you want me to take one from someone else?
Here's the thing though: so what if I do? If "I" get what I want, then you get something you like for free. At worst, you get nothing for the grand total of no cost.
You might be forced to go pay for some commercial software, where it'll cost more and you'll probably also not get your feature on demand.
Well with software the steak analogy breaks down. You’re making one steak and an unlimited number of people get to eat copies of that steak. They’re all perfect copies of a nicely cooked steak, but they all have dirt on them. And for some reason you think it’s more important to fiddle around with the charcoal instead of offering steaks without dirt.
Yes. Because every person who deals with the software has the same opinion about functionality.
Dirty food is objective. Variety isn't. "Menu is confusing" is subjective, hence some people don't feel motivated to change what they don't see as broken.
I honestly can't fathom arguing this hard to defend flagrant entitlement. You keep glossing over how your demands of fair treatment and community are directed towards someone offering to share with you without any request for reciprocity.
Usually the maintainers are people who got involved because they actually have ability and were able to change something they wanted to be different. Their opinions matter more because they actually bring something to the community.
You're not entitled to someone's nights and weekends just because they shared with you. Trying to phrase it as elementary school manners doesn't make it magically true that now they owe you.
"You invited me to dinner. If you didn't want my critique of your cooking and home decor you should have never invited me". Same entitled energy.
They are also the only steaks in the world and the person is making those steaks for free. You can get the dirt off the steak if it’s the only steak in the world.
They aren’t though. Hardly any open source projects are completely unique types of software with no alternatives.
If that’s the case, why are you going to get free dirt steak when you can go get free not dirt steak? Yes this is still the metaphor.
It’s free dirt steak or overcooked chicken or one of those delivery meal kits where you have to cook everything yourself.
But the whole point about the dirt steak is that simply not dropping it in the dirt would be so much less effort than all the arguing that has already gone on in this thread. Everyone arguing against me is trying to justify feeding people dirt because “passion project > building something really nice, clean, and polished that users love”, which is why so much of open source on the desktop remains a niche hobby for 3 decades and counting.
These people are making the steaks for themselves and are generous to offer the scraps to the community. If you go around demanding free steaks all the time, I ask why don’t you start cooking steaks too?
You speak as if it’s only generosity that motivates people to contribute to open source. That power, recognition, career advancement, or even salary (which may not be publicly acknowledged) are not factors.
You can say the same about moderators on forums or hobby wikis. I think a lot of them are motivated by the sense of ownership and power they have over others within a particular area of interest.
Yes, but you’re still getting free burgers and complaining to the chef. Whatever is motivating the chef is irrelevant.
Complaining that he keeps dropping the burgers in the dirt and then insisting we eat dirt.
Why don’t you try volunteering at a soup kitchen and trying to serve people food you dropped on the floor? Let me know how that goes for you.
When I volunteer at a soup kitchen, I am serving someone else’s soup to people. When I am the burger man changing the way burgers are being made, I am using my own money, time, and ingredients all the way through. There is a difference.
No one is insisting you eat dirt, btw. You’re willingly choosing to eat dirt and then complaining to the generous burger man after the fact.
The people being served are not poor homeless people with nowhere else to go. They are middle class, have the tools they need to cook burgers themselves, and still insist on eating someone else’s burgers.
The Open Source world is not a soup kitchen created to serve you. If that’s how you see it, then we clearly have different opinions. I don’t personally go around complaining for that free thing someone gave me to be better. That’s a weak mindset. If you want something, go build it yourself. You’ll have all the control over it that you want. Complaining about it is childish.
Those are software people. I wouldn't really consider them engineers in the sense being discussed here. Lots of software people are ready to rewrite the entire code base in a refactor bcz they think they can decouple a few systems in a better way, all the while introducing bugs while they do it. I dont know a lot of engineers willing to do that. It's not zero, I do know a few, but it's a lot less.
There’s no professional organization that all software engineers belong to, the way we have with civil engineers. This leads to a ton of ambiguity about who is a true engineer and who are software people, as you call them. This is an issue even among people who know how to write their own software.
So then should we really be surprised that non-technical MBAs can’t tell the difference between true engineers and software people?
This isn't a no true scottsman thing. An engineer is someone who also does engineering work in addition and not just software. It can be anything from structural stuff like FEA simulation, fluid dynamics, to manufacturing. That's the distinction, that's it.
How does that pertain to the above issue of businesses and MBAs and software which was nothing to do with physical engineering work? Like if you’re saying only people who understand fluid dynamics know how to build business software and the people who engage in passion project rewrites on Linux software don’t, then what? I have no idea what you’re really arguing here.
You made a statement about engineers vs software people.
Yes, because you invented the term “software people” and I took the ball and ran with it. If you’re now going to deny such a distinction then I don’t know what else to tell you.
I didn't invent anything. Why are you getting offended by a simple statement?
Well, I'd argue they're focused on the right things from their perspective, which is usually trying to optimize a thing for a purpose. Engineers are pretty good at engineering and not so good necessarily at other stuff, like every other job.
But if you tell them what you want and why, and what limitations you have, clearly. They can typically engineer the thing you want. The complications are normally money, suppliers, manufacturing, etc
Everyone is focused on the right things, from their own perspective. One of the biggest challenges with large projects is getting everyone on the same page about what’s important.
Look, I’m not saying software engineers are clueless or whatever. I think this issue occurs throughout large projects and organizations: people working on one specific part tend to see that part as the most important but people working on other parts tend to see it as less important than it is. We’re all naturally biased by our own perspectives.
I do agree that MBAs as a concept are broken. You can’t train people to be experts in all things business. The needs of specific businesses are learned only through hard experience in that business.
Wdym now it's always been like this
Jack Welch hollowed out and destroyed one of the largest conglomerates in the world, but he was able to hide the damage until after he retired and he made a ton of money doing it.
So obviously his methods became the standard for the business world, even after GE's collapse and the countless postmortems laying the blame on him.
Also engineer here. Please, listen to engineering. I'm so tired of product coming in with ideas fully detached from reality.
At one job, they got it into their head that "our system has no concept of an account. There's just projects floating around, and nothing unifying them. We need to do a bunch of work to create this". I said to myself, that's crazy. There is an account. Every project has a foreign key relationship with it. It's just not named "account" for some reason.
Listening to me took what could've been a clusterfuck of wasted weeks into a one day find-and-replace project. Personally, I would've just left it with the slightly weird name and called it a win, but I think product needed to feel like they were adding some value somehow.
Or the time they wanted to fully rewrite the internal tool for scheduling work. We had operations people that managed the field workers schedule, using some home-grown tool written years ago and never really updated. They wanted a full rewrite. I talked to the people who actually use the thing and asked them what their biggest pain points were. Looked at the code. Yeah, one of those can be fixed today, the other in a couple days. This doesn't need to be a two month project. We did it my way and operations was delighted.
One time I wasn't in the room, and product and one less good engineer got it into their head that there's no way to tell which work orders go with which set of outputs. They thought that the output just appeared, and you couldn't tell where it came from. Unfortunately, this spun up into a "we need to rewrite the entire system!" project. Some months later (of delivering no value to anyone) there were layoffs, and at great personal cost I was able to convince them that yes, there is a foreign key, and we can make significantly smaller changes to solve the actual problems. I regret not killing that initiative earlier, but I think people wanted it as a big line item on their resume.
That's all startup land.
At the megacorp I worked at, trying to convince management that we should have automated tests is like trying to speak french to someone who only speaks italian. I think they understand some of what I'm saying, maybe, but most of it's not getting through. A good chunk of the IC engineers know the system is bad and has a bunch of "we could improve this in a day" tasks we could do, but management doesn't understand. So we keep having multi-day deploys with "omg it's broken again".
Y'know what, let's circle back on this, cuz at the end of the day, we're a family here.
Now, give me 50 million dollars.
Engineering undergrad with a MBA. That's how I got my seat at the table. It's very beneficial having both perspectives. They've called me "chaotic good" because of my education and experience. 😂😂😂
when they started selling MBA degrees on the internet, it was only a matter of time for them to infiltrate office spaces with their stupid ideas and inflated egos.
Lol "now".
Engineer here. No, we refuse. Yes we hate the decision making people too, but I also have no interest in doing accounting and project management and all that bullshit, how about they just pay us to engineer shit good and then listen