Re: And here's why I think "downvotes" should be eliminated, or tabulated separately ...

[1nickt]

Here's a funny story.

A long, long time ago, back in the last decade of the last century of the previous millenium, I was building a team for a company that was growing very rapidly, as the Internet expanded quickly. We were doing fine building our stuff in Perl and keeping up with our massive growth. The work was fun and sexy and we were able to hire first_name last_name, first_name last_name, and first_name last_name*. We were kicking ass.

Then the company got its second round of VC funding and the IPO was on. Goldman Sachs were the underwriters. This led to the sudden onset of managerial incompetence and idiocy as the money suits were put in charge of the engineers. We got a CTO who was just utterly clueless, and couldn't push back against the suits at all.

The "due diligence" that the suits required and imposed was ridiculous from our point of view, but hey, the Internets were brand new, and we were scruffy young Perl hackers, so they didn't trust us. We tried various things to show the suits that we knew what we were doing, but nothing worked until we hit on the idea of spending more money. This was a big success!

So, in order to demonstrate to the underwriters that we were following best practices, we brought in some experts. We flew in Monty Widenius from Finland (!), along with his daughter, whom he was looking after, and his mom, who would babysit the daughter, and put them all up in a nice hotel. Monty was a bit confused about why he was there, but he had a nice vacation with his family, we had some nice talks about MySQL, and the suits were impressed.

Concurrently, we also flew in this guy named Mike who was a "software consultant" who had invented a Borland database maintenance tool. I forget where we found him, maybe at an ORA Perl conference. He was living at the time in Mexico, seem to remember he was from Tx.

This guy proceeded to talk for a couple of days about stuff that had nothing to do with our work. Mostly it was theoretical talk about inter-process messaging protocols. But we were using Perl, apache and mod_perl, and we had already developed our front-end lightweight proxy - to - hefty mod_perl processor backend system, and it was working great and scaling nicely. It took us a little while to get our heads around the fact that he was an emperor with no clothes -- particularly, he knew nothing about http, nor, amazingly, about Perl!

Our friend Mike waffled on and on and after a few hours we realized that he wasn't saying anything! Eventually the suits were satisfied and after a couple of days we threw him out of the office along with his big check, and went back to work.

Little did I imagine that he would still be around in 2015, still spreading FUD and misinformation and meaningless drivel in the guise of some old-school guru. Man, he was doing that in 1997! What perseverance!

The Mike Robinson I knew then was an okay guy ... not an ass, just sort of a waste of space ... he was pleasant, full of shit, and able to talk up a storm of meaningless jargon that impressed ignorant managers and made him a living.

If this is the same Mike, and I am 99.99% certain that it is, he still seems to be not a complete ass, but just as full of crap as ever. When you think about how he could pull the wool over my and first_name last_name* my senior colleague's eyes for a minute, imagine how completely he could confuse and befuddle a Perl newbie after having practiced his schtick for 25 more years!

Mike, please, your stuff was out of date in 1998 ... and you are still trying to make people believe that they are the ones missing the point. Give it up! What weird ego trip are you on, that you get your rocks off lecturing newbies, even when your lectures are uniformly discredited within minutes? Are you trying to turn a senior PM ranking into work, income? Is that effective when you are so discredited here? (Answer to self: "You can fool some of the people ... ")

( Somebody hinted at why: that you can garner XP on PM even if you contribute nothing of value, just by hanging around. If anything, I would say that what would help would be a function to deduct experience points based on downvotes. Maybe limit it to senior monks, who can be trusted to not use it for personal vindictiveness. Maybe senior monks have access to a separate kind of downvote, one that leas directly to XP--. I dunno. Probably not work that anyone is up for doing. But if Mike's objective is simply to increase his ranking on PM, he would surely quit posting crap if that led to a decrease in XP. )

* Update: redacted the names of the inocenti.

[BrowserUk]

A timely related anecdote. It's funny too :)

[LanX]

Thank you so very much for bringing some more light into this phenomenon.

I was already starting to regret digging up this thread from behind my ignore shield, but your entertaining post was definitely worth it. :)

[Your Mother]

I missed this before… ++ but now I HAZ A SAD. Which is, ever so slightly, less bad than being mad, so, thanks.