I don’t honestly expect any of you to remember this, but some time ago, when I posted an entry talking about Python and Ruby (on which comments are closed because the post is over a month old — hopefully this weekend I’ll get around to turning on the auto-moderation stuff I wrote up), I received a comment from one “Mandy Owens”, who seemed to think that, for both technical and marketing reasons, Rails makes Ruby the better choice.
I replied and disagreed with several of her points, because I thought there were some debatable things in there. Thus far, it’s normal civilized discourse.
In clicking through to her site, I found a profile of her which listed her job description, among other things, as
responsible for creating, executing and overseeing key strategies to increase market exposure for Stelligent.
Hm. A marketing person who doesn’t disclose that she’s a marketing person, and who posts lots of things which promote Rails, comments on my blog about how Rails is “[t]he one clear reason to chose (sic) Ruby over Python”.
So I wrote a comment about that. And then, feeling I might have been too harsh or too quick to judge, I asked a community forum I frequent what they thought about it. I got some serious pushback there.
But no response from Mandy in any form.
At least, not until two days ago, when she called me out on her blog and I noticed the referer in Mint.
Mandy does a pretty good job of putting words in my mouth and making this sound like much more of an issue than it ever actually was (hence my comment on her entry in which I said, “So tell me again, what’s the big deal here? The fact that my hair smells like coconut?”). And then a first-name-only commenter pops up to say that I (I’m “Shampoo Man”, apparently; I could get used to that. And hey, shampoo-man.org and shampoo-man.net are available!) am “a very bitter, bored and lonely man“.
Oh, Mandy. Now you’ve got me all verklempt. Proclaiming that I’m “just a programmer?” Arguably true, and probably the nicest thing anyone’s said about me all day. Saying I “created a forum” about you and said you’re “just in marketing”? Mandy, darling, those are what we call lies.
Was I a little testy that day, and probably harsher than I needed to be in calling her out as an undisclosed marketer? Yup.
Does that mean she doesn’t have a responsibility, when she’s endorsing things around the internet, to mention that, well, she’s in marketing? Hell, no. As I said in my comment at her blog, it’s an ethics thing; whenever I post comments in discussion forums or on other blogs about frameworks, if it’s not a community or site where people know me as a Django developer I typically go out of my way to make that point clear — I like to think it doesn’t bias me, but disclosure is disclosure, ethics are ethics and before I was “just a programmer” I did a degree in philosophy. I know whereof I speak.
Jacob gets it. So do most, if not all, of the people I respect, even if they’re “just programmers”.
But Mandy? Well, Mandy doesn’t get it. And she’s gone and made a mountain out of a molehill, so I might as well climb up and plant my flag on top of it. Writing this up has taken a bit more time than the five minutes I initially spent responding to Mandy’s comment here, posting to the TextDrive forum and posting a comment on her blog entry, but I think that time is worth spending, because when I hit the Save button, the following words will fly abroad, not to perish on waves of sound, not to vary with the writer’s hand, but fixed in time having been verified in proof:
I think Mandy Owens, Marketing Manager of Stelligent, Incorporated, could stand to learn a thing or two about ethics and a thing or two about etiquette. Especially when interacting with people who are only too ready to blog about her at the drop of a hat. After all, as commenter “Kara” says, I’m a “very bitter, bored and lonely man” who has nothing better to do.
Am I giving her free attention and publicity by doing this? Yup. But hopefully we’ll find out that not all publicity is good publicity.
And “Kara”: I love mascara. If you could just find me one that goes well with my rouge…
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I guess that’s ego that causes someone to react that way when you disagree with them?
To set the record straight, Stelligent does not have any fiduciary interest in the success or failure of Ruby on Rails. In fact, we financially support QualityLabs, which recently contributed a database seeding and verification tool written in Python.
Regardless, in her original post, Mandy gave a link to her blog, which clearly indicates her professional position. That is where you obtained the information about her in the first place.
I fail to see any attempts to obfuscate her identity or intentions, only the sharing of her opinion that the momentum behind Rails is a reason individuals might select Ruby over Python as a technology choice.
In the arena of mountains and molehills, my conclusion is that two separate discussion threads on this issue could easily be judged as the former.
In this posting, you indicate that “Jacob” gets it, but do not disclose that Jacob is a friend and co-worker of yours. Of course, I could easily learn that from following the link to his comment (just as you learned Mandy’s background from following the link to her blog), without jumping to the conclusion that you have a personal interest in the promotion of his opinions.
I cannot comment authoritatively on Herbal Essences shampoo. I can say, however, that Mandy is conscientious, hard-working and exceptionally principled. She has my full support. I am proud of her efforts and the high ethics that accompany their execution.
By way of disclosure, I am the CEO of Stelligent. You are welcome to contact me directly if you have continuing concerns about the professional behavior of our employees.
Yes, Jacob is a friend and a co-worker of mine. If we want to split hairs, then consider that he disclosed that fact when commenting on Mandy’s blog entry, where he’d be an unknown quantity. Here, however, he’s not an unknown quantity — he’s a friend and co-worker of mine, as regular readers of my blog know.
Which, in a way, gets to the heart of the issue: when you’re a stranger posting a comment somewhere for the first time, the ethics should kick in, and you should let people know about anything that might bias you, or be percevied to bias you. About five minutes before I saw your comment, I did exactly that in a comment I left on someone’s blog. Adrian Holovaty, who’s not a co-worker of mine but is the lead developer of Django, did the same.
Noticing a pattern?
I’d like to think that it’s not just the weird combination of a philosophy degree and a job at a newspaper (where the ethics of bias and disclosure are a very real and very large issue) that make me feel like even a simple one-sentence note that she works in marketing would have been the right thing to do.
And if it’s such a small issue, how did it merit a nicely-formatted blog entry from Mandy and a personal note from you here on my blog? ;)
Authors that inform their readers of relevant biases demonstrate respect for their readers’ intelligence to weight the author’s biases against the author’s message.
It is unfortunate that too many authors (professionals and amateurs via blogs, forums, newspapers, TV, etc.) do not show this respect, as doing so would significantly improve their credibility and, therefore, the impact of their message.
So, great post James.