On 1/19/13 10:35 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote:
This material is way too good to be packed down into the midden of old email.
I know someone who is a good programmer. He's generally better than the
people around him and among other things he has been accused of being
purposely uncommunicative. He's smart. He has said things like "If you
want to know what's going on, read the commit log and read the source
code diffs." Other people felt that he should write high level
documents, give talks, and so on. He felt it was not his problem if
people were not willing or were not able to bring themselves up to
speed. To him, they just would not engage. He was interested in the
problem and not in educating people. He had no problem educating himself.
There's a similar situation here. A goal a person can have from a
conversation is to extract some information from another, as if
acquiring an asset. Another goal a person can have is to just have a
conversation or argument for its own sake.
A slightly motivated person can handle some headers.
Marcus
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