As an OSS maintainer, a pet peeve of mine is when someone asks why something is a particular way, when what they really mean is "I don't want to configure it to my preferences and I want you to change the way this works".
The "why" question sets things up for the maintainer to be on the defensive, which implies that the answer needs to be well researched and reasoned, which takes extra effort.
Ultimately the person asking doesn't care about any of this, making the whole thing a waste.
@wez I can certainly understand that position, but I sometimes ask that kind of “why” question to truly understand if/why that way is better than my preference, or to even find out if it wasn’t really thought about and it was just a choice without good backing (and maybe it could change). I see developers make “we’ve always done it this way but I don’t really know why” decisions all the time.
Good prompt to be more careful about that, though.
Add comment