Staff Complaint - Arrow768

[VTCobaltblood]

BYOND Key: VTCobaltblood
Staff BYOND Key: Arrow768
Game ID: N/A
Reason for complaint: Horrible conduct. Putting other staff down in staff chat.
Evidence/logs/etc:



Additional remarks: Not sure why it's OK for head staff to bully a specific person (Paradox) at all (it is a pretty recurrent pattern of behavior), but this specific complaint is smaller in scope.

[Arrow768]

Thank you for posting this thing completely out of context.

Did you contact any of the other admins or headmins/devs present at the time about this conduct and why not?

I only have a limited patience, as everyone, and and if certain people come up with the same ridiculous ideas over and over again after they (again) screwed up a PR by not properly testing it as they were told to do last time (and the times before), this patience will run out eventually.
Which is what happened here.

[VTCobaltblood]

7 minutes ago, Arrow768 said:

Thank you for posting this thing completely out of context.

I'm not sure what context is needed here. Saying something like "usual paradox brainfart" is not okay in any context. For "valuable" opinions, sure:
 

Spoiler

I guess people saying that TCFL is too rare isn't really a valuable opinion.

As for your patience argument, you're head staff. You're expected to not outright insult people. If you're running out of patience, you surely can just walk out from a conversation, or, I don't know, apologize for insulting someone instead of thinking up excuses?

You also belong to the group which is responsible for deciding what gets merged and what does not. Merging an untested, buggy PR is also your fault. This is no excuse to insult the person who made the PR with the best intentions in mind.

Edited July 7, 2019 by VTCobaltblood

[Arrow768]

1 minute ago, VTCobaltblood said:

I guess people saying that TCFL too rare isn't really a valuable opinion.

And where exactly is the difference to that?

 

As the saying goes: "What goes around, comes around."

[VTCobaltblood]

28 minutes ago, Arrow768 said:

And where exactly is the difference to that?

 

As the saying goes: "What goes around, comes around."

Four things:
1. Paradox is not head staff.
2. Paradox didn't insult you directly. 
3. Paradox didn't ignore people very clearly getting offended afterwards.
4. Paradox's remark isn't actually comparable to yours. The ""people"" in his sentence was more referring to the fact that there aren't that much people who oppose the legion because it's underpowered, not saying that these opinions aren't at all valuable.

Edited July 7, 2019 by VTCobaltblood

[Snakebittenn]

So it does.

[Arrow768]

Well, that was because as usual you did not read the PR or did not know what a mechanic does before commenting about it.


"Basically nothing" in this case means a entire new subsystem that loads lore relevant notes from the database or a json file depending on the configuration and then places those notes in predetermined locations or computers based on tags associated with those notes.

So very far from "basically nothing"

[VTCobaltblood]

1 minute ago, Arrow768 said:

Well, that was because as usual you did not read the PR or did not know what a mechanic does before commenting about it.

Why is this an excuse to insult someone when you're head staff of the server?

[Arrow768]

I did not insult them with that. I just made a comment that it is usual for them to do this. (Complain about things that they do not fully understand)

A insult would look quite different.

[Snakebittenn]

You certain $people was not just codespeak for "people"? I could swear it is, and if not, it could still be easily read as "paradox is not a person among the people wondering about said testmerge in this instance."

[Arrow768]

1 hour ago, ParadoxSpace said:

You certain $people was not just codespeak for "people"? I could swear it is, and if not, it could still be easily read as "paradox is not a person among the people wondering about said testmerge in this instance."

Thank you for showing how stupid this whole complaint about $people, ""people"" and $opinions is.

It just comes down to what the person on the other end wants to interpret into it.

[Snakebittenn]

I don't think it's particularly fair for you to use an excerpt about me against me as evidence, then infer that my excerpt about you was stupid in the first place.

[Pratepresidenten]

I want to ask @VTCobaltblood, but, you keep referencing that Arrow is head staff, and being snark from time to time is unacceptable for such a position. Why is this exactly?

Would it be acceptable for another staff member of "Lesser rank" to bully or snark someone of equal or greater rank?

Their title comes with time and dedication, to have proven themselves capable. I dont think its fair at all to layer on that they should be the posterchild of humanity with infinite patience and they should never do any wrong.

Arrow is a person like the rest of us, he has his his views and his limits.

[Skull132]

Hi, complaint's mine to oversee.

First, to quickly cover some ground already covered elsewhere. The following assertion is not up for debate in this complaint.

2 hours ago, VTCobaltblood said:

You also belong to the group which is responsible for deciding what gets merged and what does not. Merging an untested, buggy PR is also your fault. This is no excuse to insult the person who made the PR with the best intentions in mind. 

The testing of PRs is not the job of a Head Developer nor that of a maintainer. The job of a maintainer is to ensure in the stability and functionality of the codebase. Due to practical concerns (we merged over 70 PRs last month), we rely on the authors to test them and to present relevant information. If a bad PR gets merged, then the maintainers have two options really: to acquire a bugfix for the PR somehow, or to revert it. The latter was done in this instance.

Further note, I'd prefer primarily to see dialogue on this matter between @ParadoxSpace and @Arrow768, since this is largely a matter of interpersonal communication. A large deal of evidence submitted to Alb, and by proxy to me, was just banter or a heated discussion. Banter and discussions where both sides can be perceived to be at fault: take the TCFL vs ERT debate. Arrow posted a sarcastic comment disvaluing player opinion, perhaps he should not have. Paradox, in the same discussion, should not have ridiculed the idea of trying to keep ERT relevant (because 'we need ERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!') and should not have personally attacked Arrow's activity (considering i play more). Note that we have about 500 regular players a month, if not more, so insistence that your opinion is somehow more important than the other 499 iiis. An old joke the Head Developers deal with quite regularly. Specially as of late.

Ultimately, I would prefer that the staff team actually be able to communicate internally effectively, and either:

• simply roll with the shit, instead of assuming the worst or taking it to heart;
• do a double-take and communicate immediately about a matter being taken too far or off-topic.

If taken far enough, point two will effectively mean the issuing of strikes and eventual dismissal (or GH bans if relevant), dependent on behaviour.

[Arrow768]

@ParadoxSpace What exactly is it that you would like me to address?

[Snakebittenn]

7 minutes ago, Arrow768 said:

@ParadoxSpace What exactly is it that you would like me to address?

I want to address you coming after me, or making snide comments about myself or the quality of my Pull Requests (especially when I am not even present), as well as even playfully dismissing peoples' opinions on things you have added. While I know I am often of an equal hand in these, sometimes I am not but it happens anyway.

[Arrow768]

I want to address you coming after me, or making snide comments about myself or the quality of my Pull Requests (especially when I am not even present),

Well, you have a track record of pull requests that are broken and not sufficiently tested for example: (I am sure that there are others that I am forgetting here)

• Bar signs
• Zorane Soda
• Disables ERT on Revolution

You were repeatedly told to test your pull requests properly and check for both functionality, error cases and unwanted side effects, yet you still produce pull requests with issues that would have been revealed during the simplest of tests (For the bar signs PR that would have been activating the bar signs; For the Rev PR that would have been starting a rev round).

This is pretty much the most harmless comment that I could make on that matter.

There are things which are soo much worse that I could have said regarding your inability to test PRs after being told to do so repeatedly and this was probaply the most harmless thing that I could have said about it.

The post I made about "paradox being paradox" has been addressed here:

It is not my fault that you choose to name yourself paradox.
If you named yourself john I would have written "its just john being john".

And again, this was probably the softest way that I could address geeves question about the test merge which you described as being "nothing".
I could have explained to them, that you have a proven track record of being unable to read code and therefore do not understand what this PR does, and that it is indeed quite complicated and therefore needs to be testmerged. (And we actually found two issues during the test merge one of which is a major issue which prevented the system from being used.)
I choose not to say that but instead "sugarcoat" it.

---

Regarding the "usual paradox brainfart"

and

"as well as even playfully dismissing peoples' opinions on things you have added"

According to the oxford dictionary of english a brain fart is "A temporary mental lapse or failure to reason correctly."
https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/brain_fart
 

Spoiler

 

I believe that expressions such as these (which are stitched together from various statements during the conversation) can be described as a failure to reason correctly:

Spoiler

This is also what I considered "valuable" opinions as most of these things do not argue about the topic objectively.
Therefore I do not consider them "valuable".

The "usual" before the brain fart is because you often refer to such arguments in various discussions.

Is there something else that you would like me to address?

[VTCobaltblood]

Is it seriously being argued here that calling people's thoughts and opinions "brainfarts" is actually OK and justified? What is wrong with this staff team? How can you conciously, continuously try to validate intentionally making the staff chat an unwelcome environment for a specific contributor? Didn't we adopt a policy to make chats less toxic? Why is head staff of the server suddenly exempt from it and gets a free pass because apparently they think they were right, and the offended party is suggested to, well, just "roll with the shit"? 

Edited July 8, 2019 by VTCobaltblood

[Rushodan]

Perhaps we all need a chat about conduct, maybe Arrow shouldn't have made the brainfart comment, but unpopular opinion if you get offended by such a basic remark than thicker skin is required. I don't want the chat to be a safe space where I have to tread on eggshells in case x gets offended.

On another note, para isn't innocent either here. I've had para insult me countless times over the years I have known them and the way it happens is typically like this:
>Para makes a suggestion
>I disagree with the suggestion and give a reason
>We go back and forth on what we both think without a lot of progress
>Para ends up insulting me and I ask him not to do so before the discussion kinda dies off.

Why don't I save logs and make a Staff complaint about Para? Because I don't really care. I might get ticked off but at the end of the day we are reasonable people that can move past these arguments, at least from my side.

Heres an example of what I am talking about below, in case anyone wants proof of what was said:

Basically implying I am an idiot because apparently I believe that antags shouldn't be able to win.

[Snakebittenn]

 

 

 

9 minutes ago, SHODAN said:

a lot of things

I clarified *literally right after that log* that I was not referring to you. It was an off-handed comment about people I have previously engaged with that don't quite understand the concept of antagonists winning. 'I know this is a radical concept' was certainly snark, but I was not making any aimed statements at you. The least you could do is not crop that out.

Also, you have not been innocent in our prior engagements either.
 

[Rushodan]

4 minutes ago, ParadoxSpace said:

I clarified *literally right after that log* that I was not referring to you. It was an off-handed comment about people I have previously engaged with that don't quite understand the concept of antagonists winning. 'I know this is a radical concept' was certainly snark, but I was not making any aimed statements at you. The least you could do is not crop that out.

Also, you have not been innocent in our prior engagements either.
 

I admit I am not innocent either, however I did not include the bottom part as it /felt/ directed at me. If I misunderstood then that's on me.

Edited July 8, 2019 by SHODAN

[Arrow768]

@ParadoxSpaceIs there something else that you would like me to address that was not covered in my previous post?

[Skull132]

As I explained before to Paradox in private, you will likely not find anyone that matches the desired image of "innocent" within our community. All of us get irate, all of us take jabs at each other, all of us make failed jokes, etcetera. Even Chada will eventually drop down from his zen if you try hard enough to get him annoyed. Countering with, "Well, you said mean things too!" is a bit pointless to that end. Ultimately, we should act like adults and should be able to understand that the expectation to remain cordial 24/7 is reserved for an environment where you're actually paid a salary, and that things will get heated. Either dismiss some stuff in your head, or speak to the person (as Arrow is trying to do and Paradox is responding to, intermittently) about your issues and misgivings.

Becrying staff toxicity is not really productive unless there's actual malicious intent or other tomfoolery at play. Eg. attacks that are uncalled for. (And no, referring to a clear mistake as a brain fart does not quality.)

Oh and yeah. If you act dismissively towards someone, as Paradox has done in cases, then expect them to act dismissively towards you as well. If this is an issue, you go and talk to them. And expect both of you to have to make changes, not just a point of, "Hey can you cut it out while I continue? Kthx." ONCE that fails, you make a staff complaint.

[VTCobaltblood]

3 hours ago, Skull132 said:

Becrying staff toxicity is not really productive unless there's actual malicious intent or other tomfoolery at play. Eg. attacks that are uncalled for.

So what you're arguing here is that all attacks by Arrow are called for because Paradox was attacking him as well? Shouldn't actual action be taken here instead of going all "hey well you just deal with it it's not a safe space lol"? 
 

You yourself state:

23 hours ago, Skull132 said:

Ultimately, I would prefer that the staff team actually be able to communicate internally effectively

So shouldn't the staff chat be at least somewhat policed to prevent insults and personal attacks of this nature? Shouldn't our management, the head staff team, be the ones to make us at least somewhat work together instead of just shrugging when people openly attack each other, especially when the ones insulting and belittling other people are also the head staff of the server? 

Yes, I admit that Paradox's behavior is not ideal. Why does the head staff deal with it by insults instead of taking actual action?

[Skull132]

8 hours ago, VTCobaltblood said:

So shouldn't the staff chat be at least somewhat policed to prevent insults and personal attacks of this nature? Shouldn't our management, the head staff team, be the ones to make us at least somewhat work together instead of just shrugging when people openly attack each other, especially when the ones insulting and belittling other people are also the head staff of the server? 

Yes, I admit that Paradox's behavior is not ideal. Why does the head staff deal with it by insults instead of taking actual action?

Instead of cherry picking, please read the paragraph in full. Or just the final line of the post, which is a summary in and of itself: "If it's an issue [you go talk to them]". As I mentioned, keeping a strictly professional attitude indoors is something you can do if you start legitimately paying staff. Why? Because it requires a decent amount of effort to detach yourself emotionally enough to pull it off. Which is why I do not mind if people nag on each other, as long as everyone involved is okay with it. Like, we have over 50 dudes in chat, all from different cultures and with different world views. There is a lot of grounds for friction and misunderstandings (a good example here is Paradox not being comfortable with Arrow's sense of humour, eg the "Opinions" joke), and we should acknowledge and work to solve this, instead of trying to assimilate everything into a white room with no distinguishing features.

A decent example of this is PoZe and I. We both get passionate about code sometimes and some of our disagreements on how to do something can be very fun to watch, I am certain. But at the end of the day, I do not think less of him, I would hope he doesn't think less of me either; I review his code, help him out, merge his code, and life goes on. Psure we've even talked about it a few years ago.

And again. No one is actually seething, outright undermining, sabotaging, etcetera. Not that I can see anyways. Arrow is trying to communicate, @ParadoxSpace needs to respond (to Arrow first and foremost). Arrow still merges Paradox's PRs, work gets done, and so forth.