I’ve learned that when I have a positive thought about someone, it’s generally worth communicating it. If I think a coworker saved me on some project, I tell them. If my partner is making me feel warm and fuzzy, I tell her. If someone impresses me, I say so. I don’t think people express these things nearly as often as they feel them, and I expect that many of the positive things that do end up communicated have another motive behind them. Simple earnest positive comments are very much worthwhile.
"I’ve learned that when I have a positive thought about someone, it’s generally worth communicating it."
I've started to do this on a regular, almost daily basis.
If I come across something that sparks joy or interest - usually something I find here, on HN - I reach out to the author and let them know with a personal email.
I also sometimes offer a free-forever-no-strings-attached rsync.net account on the off chance that they would find that useful.
In reality, the Venn diagram of "people who write things that spark joy to the founder of rsync.net" and "people who aren't already self-hosting their own solution " is small.
But once in a while it really makes someones day ...
I've been using rsync for months now to backup my files onto Google Drive, but that's hardly ideal. Ideally, I'd want to self-host or use a storage service other than Google Drive, but as a student I've got barely any money to spend on subscriptions.
> I don’t think people express these things nearly as often as they feel them, and I expect that many of the positive things that do end up communicated have another motive behind them.
I have the displeasure of working with a team member who does the exact opposite: at every chance he gets, he expressed his displeasure regarding other team members to management. Once I confronted him about that behavior and he stated that those who fix problems get promoted while those who create them get passed over, and he believed that by pointing other people's flaws he would improve his chances of moving upward.
I firmly believe that's the main reason most people don't praise anyone else. If they do, they are calling out their competitor's positive contributions, while no one reciprocates in kind.
This is a terrible mindset to have. When I was a manager I took every opportunity to praise my employees (with meaningful compliments and feedback) and discouraged negativity. During a management team meeting I even stood against the others on promoting someone because he was always negative and I pointed out how inefficient his coworkers were around him and that he would only continue that, it didn't matter how good he was himself at the job, he needed to be encouraged to change for the better. After working with him for a while and helping him see how he was hurting others and himself, he changed his mindset, and was later promoted, I continued to coach him even after I left that location.
My basic point is this, even those with the wrong mindset can be swayed with the right mindset, as long as it is sincere.
I hear you. But having once worked with team-members who take critique at anything, personally, I feel there is more to this.
I always try to praise a person. But I also want to "reserve all rights" to say that a codebase is crap or a choice made in the past was evidently a bad choice.
Finding the balance to critique work that a person contributed to, without criticising that person itself, is hard. A true challenge, I found.
It becomes even harder if a project is Open Source and you truly feel you have to "warn" people against using a solution in certain cases. It then becomes really hard not to sound like a grumpy old neckbeard or someone with a grudge. I lately decided it is best to just shut up, and let people find out themselves; to let them fail, fall or possibly succeed and prove me wrong instead. I do see the arrogance of that too, though.
I've had peers like that too. I'm sad at the proliferation of zero-sum thinking. It's like a prisoner's dilemma. The equilibrium state is competition, but collaboration gets us all ahead in a non-zero-sum way. Or, if you really do see it all as zero sum, there's still an analytical way out. Just take the long view. Collaboration will get our group ahead of the group who competes for the smallest things. Hyperbolically, we'd all rather be a low level IC at early my-shares-will-be-worth-infinity Google than be a VP at an imploding firm.
The pro-social way out of the prisoner's dilemma's shitty equilibrium requires deliberate effort to foster the sort of personal trust and collaboration-by-default attitude that makes the 8+ work hours of every weekday of most of our lives not suck.
And it makes people feel good, which is personally enough for me (while recognizing the privilege that lets me say I have enough).
It’s possible this individual has a personal experience or upbringing where reciprocal behaviors were not respected. It’s possible he’s correct in certain workplaces.
I’d hate to work with such an individual; I’d avoid them like the plague.
To me “good culture” is the de-emphasis of these kinds of mindsets (and emphasis of the opposite). To the point where it’s justification for hire/fire.
Bad things and behaviours should be called out in order to actively fix them instead of just waiting on that they are magically fixed. But this must be done in a constructive way.
Pointing that something is wrong won't fix it, and if in the meantime you manage to ruin relationships within your team you have actively made things worse just to pretend being a good leader, but just proving you are an awful person to work with (and at this point you might still be wrong about your claim on what's wrong).
I can confirm that some people think like this ( not me).
I delegated some areas during a big event and I took one of those persons asside because he was too rude.
He said that he pointed out mistakes ( which was correct, but they were new) and that they would remember it better if he was this direct. I just mentioned that he should not be this rude and just explain them what they did wrong and he adjusted. It was literally his mindset ( he adjusted that evening, not his mindset)
This reflects just as badly on the org's leadership, as it does on the individual. Managers and other leaders need to give people a talking to, when they engage in toxic behavior. And they need to set a good example by promoting people who are good teammates. Do this consistently, and people will change their behavior for the better.
He's doing you a favor. Now you know that if he gets promoted faster than you or your co-workers, it's probably time to find a better company (or a better team, if that's an option).
Great idea. People can usually sense when a compliment is genuine or forced. So sharing your positive thoughts ensures that most things you say are genuine.
I realized that I am biased toward communicating things like feedback or suggestions.
Yet I do have many positive thoughts about others that I keep to myself. I don't know why I do this.
To an extent. As I become more generous with my compliments, I find that even a genuine compliment might be too much sometimes. That being said, I never miss a chance to praise people's work. As long as you don't make a big scene out of it, it's always appreciated.
Completely agree. I prefer private praise both as a recipient and as a giver. Often I’ll send a quick note to the person’s manager as well. Occasionally, if it’s really spectacular work, I’ll cc our org’s upper management as well.
Personal thanks are just as important as monetary compensation. You build your surroundings and support your life with money, but you build your self esteem and support your motivation with gratitude.
In my last job (currently unemployed) I made a conscious effort to:
1. Always publicly thank contributors for each unit of work I encountered, no matter how mundane, and especially when I recognized the value where it wouldn’t necessarily be visible/“hot” otherwise.
2. To make regular time for specific recognition of work that stood out to me, both public and direct, again especially highlighting important work that wouldn’t otherwise get a lot of light. (By now it should be obvious that I tend to work in libraries/infrastructure where good work tends to be mostly invisible.)
3. To try to continuously add visibility where work tended to be more foundational/less visible, so others would be encouraged to add to that recognition.
4. To make sure positive feedback was included wherever general or even critical feedback was warranted.
I’m not perfect and never perfected execution on those goals, but it was always an underlying part of how I interacted with my team. It improved my relationship with every team member who I most butted heads with (save one who was reflexively adversarial and invented conflict for even the tiniest work items; some people are just jerks!). And it also made a lot of people just generally more comfortable with their own contributions and better able to see their own value.
On every retrospective session we do, every other week, there is an additional column called “stars” or “heros” and we add a note each there giving praises to someone else for something they did those two weeks. We then read them all out followed by a round of applause for each one of them. It brings great positivity to the team.
That sounds horrible to me. I’d much rather be in the background rather than getting effusive, mandatory public praise. Maybe I’m weird, but I’m not motivated by cupcakes, gold stars and clapping. If I do a good job, that’s just the minimum standard. If I do something worthy of clapping, then just remember that when it’s time to award annual RSUs and bonuses or when a special project comes up that needs leadership.
To me it’s embarrassing to be recognized publicly for literally doing what I am being paid to do. Instead, perhaps recognize each week the people that didn’t meet the standard:
“Wanted to recognize Bob this week for being a bit of a douche as well as letting all of us down when he messed up the build system and delayed our build delivery to QA and the Loc team thus having the rest of us having to scramble over the weekend to clean up the mess. Thanks Bob!”
Lots of folks seem to dislike the star / hero approach, but my team has a simple “thanks” column in our retros and it works really well to set the tone for the rest of the conversation - and it’s a great reminder to say thanks. Even if it’s just “thanks for being you.” It’s a great way to express gratitude without it having to be some “best of the best” style moment.
It’s appropriate for a manager or team lead to do this. It’s not appropriate to make it the norm (even if it’s “optional”) for the whole team.
Much better for a leader to model the desired behavior, and, create space for those on the team, of their own volition and without peer pressure, follow suit.
It will also be much more authentic, real, and meaningful.
You might need to adjust how you're praising people. A simple earnest slack DM of "thanks for the hand with that thing! i really appreciate you taking the time to do that" will still make people feel great.
We've got a `gratitude` channel in Slack for this exact thing! Its only purpose is to call out great work and nice gestures coworkers have done. Provides a nice little pick-me-up throughout the week.
I've been on the receiving end of such gratitude, and it always brightens my day. It's easy to think your hard work isn't noticed, until you realize how seldom you acknowledge other people's work.
Unfortunately, explicit gratitude is very rare. Donations are even rarer. The "ask a question" and "support this site" buttons on my website are next to each other. I get 15 questions for every donation. About 30€ per 100 000 visitors, from 1-3 visitors. Those who email me with questions never donate. I'm not complaining about any of this, just illustrating my point: you can't use gratitude as a metric for the value of your work.
Critics, on the other hand, are disproportionately loud. As a community moderator, I learned that for every complainer, there are dozens of quietly happy users. You can only tell by the votes. No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
If someone made your day easier, or if they created something good, take a minute to thank them. If they saved you a ton of work, consider a small donation. A lot of people are tirelessly, thanklessly creating things that benefit you. It costs nothing to acknowledge it. Never let a compliment go unused.
In the last few years, I became better at expressing my gratitude to creators, maintainers, colleagues and friends.
Can you ask them to? It's not exactly the same problem, but I have a modestly successful youtube channel, and I get unsolicited email questions seeking help every day, and I personally try and answer all that I can. I've used the following technique and it helped me receive donations to offset the support effort.
I added a quiet but clear call to action my support replies. It's in a smaller font and below the actual support reply, but it significantly increased the number of donations, and it helps offset my support time. I went from getting no donations, to donations on over 80% of the support questions I answer. Maybe this would work for you too.
Here is what I add at the bottom of help questions I receive:
----
As you might expect, I get a lot of requests for help. If you found my response helpful, a small donation for my time is totally optional, but appreciated so that I can continue to offer it as a service. http://buymeacoffee.com/boothjunkie
I've noticed something similar in my line of work.
One of the major "metrics" that we track is how much a customer has to put effort in to fix an issue/ticket. This is measured via a survey that's sent out after ticket closure, but many customers never see it or choise not to respond.
A few months ago, I started adding a little post script "A survey is sent out after this case closes. I would appreciate it if you answered it!". Response rates for the survey jumped from 11% to 75%. Many of the responses were generally positive as well, trending our scores up by 11% and still climbing.
Sometimes asking nicely is a powerful tool, for good and potentially evil.
The website already earns enough. Donations wouldn't make a big difference, so I don't feel comfortable directly asking for them. Nonetheless, I'll give it a try. Thank you for the suggestion!
> No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
I was lucky enough to receive a thread exactly like this [0], in response to a user complaining about my support response time [1]. Admittedly, it was in response to me saying "No-one ever writes threads like this", but it was still lovely to receive.
I just read that old complaint thread you linked to. Sorry you had to deal with that, and thank you for making software for all of us people, polite or not.
I was surprised to find that someone left a brief "thank you" issue on one of my open source projects (a Kubernetes hairpin proxy to fix issues with cert-manager and LoadBalancers) and it feels great to know that the right people are finding it and resolving the same problem that led me to build it.
I humbly hope that sharing this might inspire more humanity and gratitude in the open source community.
I'm always amazed at how more people do not know about the Proxy protocol. (Also why is this not an RFC?)
I suspect one reason is because the cloud vendors push hard for layer 7 routing, and cloud managed cert management. (ie: ALB and ACM.) These have a lot of vendor lock-in, whereas k8s layer 4 ingress and cert-manager do not.
Similarly, I got a shoutout/tag on a PR that used some of my code. It made my day, and made me assume that the org the engineer works in must be a pretty good place to work.
Expressing gratitude is one of the surest paths to a better day.
One of my all-time favorite books -- "How to Want What You Have" by Tim Miller, PhD -- has as its central thesis the idea that:
1. Most people are relatively unhappy;
2. The root cause is our tendency always to want More [money/power, love, recognition] -- which stems from evolutionarily adaptive traits;
3. The remedy is to live in the present moment -- which one can learn to do by deliberately practicing three closely-related things:
1. Compassion
2. Attention
3. Gratitude
The book is (sadly, inexplicably) out of print, but it's popular enough there are plenty of used copies for sale. I first encountered HTWWYH in a 5th-edition hardcover, and it was transformative. Highest posaible recommendation.
I will find a copy of the book to see what I can learn from it. Until now I've learnt that one cannot attain happiness as a state. It's fleeting. I stumble across it in moments, and it's gone again. And so I try to be content, which is much more persistent.
Very similar ideas are foundational to the practice of meditation/mindfulness and teachings of Buddhism generally. Popular teachers such as Jack Kornfield, Thich Nhat Hanh, Sharon Salzburg, Pema Chodron (among many others) have great books covering these ideas.
There's a very very old saying "There's more happiness in giving than there is in receiving."
One of the key things I believe most people forget is that being a free giver doesn't mean only to participate in charity and help those in need. It means to act like this to everyone, including those around us. Most people need encouragement and to feel appreciate, and I believe culturally we don't show enough of it.
I run a website with hundreds of documents simply explaining how I resolved issues. It keeps me going when people simply email me to say thank you.
As an example, one of my most popular pages is a set of instructions on how to install 20 year old sewing machine software, that requires hardware keys, on modern Windows machines.
I've wanted to do this for the mundane to complicated issues I've faced, even for myself since sometimes I need to reproduce something (or help someone for the same problem). Never really sure what platform to use or how to do it. Because issues are very broad and it then looks messy. I've looked at your wiki and I'm still unsure how to proceed...
Some people are pointing out how rare it is for GitHubbers to express gratitude, but GitHub doesn't exactly encourage it. Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"? Maybe if there was a natural place for these messages they'd be sent more often. To the extent that there are affordances for it (stars, emojis) it is actually quite popular to praise good work on GitHub.
This is what I wonder. I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?" For anyone tasked with maintaining a repo, any email notification of new issues must come with a certain level of dread. At least that's what it's like for me, even if I sincerely appreciate and enjoy receiving issues!
I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.
My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."
> I've opened "thank you" issues before, and wondered "how much will this annoy the owner/watchers?"
I've deliberately not opened "Thank you" issues, because I didn't want to annoy the owner/watchers. Certainly frustrating there is no way to express gratitude.
I star projects that have caught my attention and might be relevant for my work, or that I will need to reference later. I don't see how this relates to a display of gratitude.
I think it depends on the scale of the project. If it's a project that isn't full of all kinds of bug reports and issues already, thank you notes aren't a bad thing.
As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
I always look for a Twitter account or something to send my gratitude to. It feels like a more natural place to do it than in an issue. The only downside is that a tweet only goes to one person, while if you open an issue, all contributors can see it more easily.
What I usually do is append something like "thank you for the effort" (and sometimes explain how good this project is for my use case) when I open a new issue or comment on an existing one.
Opening and then closing "thank you" issues solves the annoyance problem, doesn't it? It's a NOOP for the maintainer, but it gets the message across. /$0.02
Idk. I think your comment sums up a general change that internet based interaction has created. I used to think it was generational but now I think it has more to do with spending most of your socializing online as opposed to in person.
In person interaction naturally flows towards gratitude. Online interactions, like the one I’m having right now feels disposable. I don’t see your face and we can’t form much human connection.
This leads to an online world of shallow interactions that leave us feeling alone an empty. Much like what happens to people that live in large dense cities.
Our online interactions are so shallow, we feel it is the responsibility a product we are buying to facilitate a particular form of interaction as opposed to simply taking it upon ourselves to do it.
We're talking about interrupting a stranger to listen to us here. How often do you do that IRL? Do you just do it any old time, or do you look for certain signals that it is OK?
I do think there is a generational "thing" where older people tend to see online interactions as superficial and unreal, while younger people see them as a natural extension of the IRL social sphere. As a younger person, I find it easy to point out that interactions with strangers present similar difficulties whether online or IRL.
You have to work against that. It is usually totally possible to write an email to people with good repos. If they made your day, this is just part of giving back.
This is not what you are talking about but I would like to mention that as a contributor I feel like I often get a thank you note after I open a PR or even an issue in stranger repos. In my experience gratitude towards contributors is the norm, not the exception.
> Doesn't it feel inappropriate to express gratitude as an "issue"?
Yes, because it is, but I'd dispute the claim that GitHub discourages it. If anything, the people who use GitHub are more willing/most likely to misuse bugtracker for not just support requests but also general discussion and comments like this. It seems like there's a (non) issue like this that gets linked at least once a month on HN. I click through, get annoyed with the person who opened it, read the maintainer's response, get annoyed with their endorsement/encouragement of the idea, close the window, and then file it away in my mind or my bookmarks or both as an example of how annoying it is to try to collaborate with people whose platform of choice is GitHub.
Post this stuff on Twitter, or a mailing list, or a discussion board. Or at the very least, be productive and file a bug that says something like, "I wanted to express my gratitude for this project, but the README doesn't link to any public venues for general discussion". You know: things that at least attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate bugs? Or just don't do any of that and keep posting this sort of thing on GitHub--but in that case, please kindly also curb your and your colleagues' whinging in all future instances where you find that someone has chosen not to host on GitHub and, upon with being asked to, they say "no" and point to things like this as being among the reasons why GitHub users can't be trusted to make responsible use of project infrastructure.
Brave browser has made this integration where you can tip their token to people on GitHub (and Twitter, reddit and any site that people can verify domain ownership). Seems one of the best ways to show appreciation and gratitude without making it feel like a transaction or causing any kind of expectation like becoming a sponsor or patron of the project.
Maybe we should bring back the "guest books" of the early internet, where you're expected to leave positive feedback if you want to.
I'm not sure that general purpose reviews/forums are the right way to address this issue, because those can generate negative feedback as easily as positive and generate additional stress for the maintainer. I think a simple dedicated "you can leave a public thank you message to the maintainer here if you want" text box would do the trick.
Personally, a text area is the only thing I need to express my gratitude. I'm doubtful about a UI that would "encourage" it.
The last time I wrote on a GitHub issue, I started my message with a warm thankful line to the maintainer for his fabulous work. I meant it, and I didn't need any "reminder" to say so. It felt natural and important to me. I also put relevant informations to show my interest and the time I spent thinking about it. In the end, I believe it's more about the person posting, rather than the interface encouraging it, but I may be wrong.
I wonder if fairly standard reviews might be helpful here. 1-5 stars, with text, and perhaps also links to issues if there are problems and an opportunity to share "used at $company" for endorsement.
Or perhaps just a built-in "endorsement" feature, which companies can use to indicate that they use a project and find it valuable, perhaps listed on the sidebar. Could also segue into paid sponsorship and support.
Insofar as GitHub provides package management, they could also prompt companies to endorse the packages they use.
All of this might get annoying, nasty, or inauthentic, of course. Would need to be careful...
I think the discussions feature might be a little more comfortable for more people to express gratitude, but like you said even that isn’t explicit enough. I also feel disinclined to post gratitude for fear it’ll register as noise.
IMO since GH tends to be somewhat aware of how people piggyback their platform, a README gratitude badge might be a good place to start. It can be as simple as a button click plus an optional prompt to add commentary. In fact, I might make this a smol project to see if it gets some traction.
I loved a library on github enough to track down the creator on twitter and thank him there. Not sure if he never saw it, or just didn't acknowledge it.
I guess that is one features Github should "try" and work. Somewhere that users can express their gratitude ( in a non subtle way ) Sometimes it isn't just a dollar of sponsor, but people explaining what problem they had, how it help them, and notes of thanks.
After all, Github is more like a Social Coding Platform.
This is baked into Git at the core, but just like many other cases, GitHub subverts the intent of fundamental expectations about the way Git is supposed to be used and actively goes out of its way to make it difficult if you're interacting with the project through GitHub instead of local tools. (In fact, for new GitHub accounts, it even defaults to obscuring users' contact info, and it attributes all changes made through the web UI to an opaque @github.com email address. You have to deliberately go into the settings to turn this off, without ever getting a notification that that's what GitHub is doing.)
The missing state is 'resolved' between 'open' and 'closed' giving that time/space for interaction, or perhaps a closed disposition label 'resolved' as long as it is as easily surfaced.
I thought the star button was a convenient way to keep track of projects you're interested in.
> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?
I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.
Two times recently I wanted to express thanks (or just ask a question) and couldn't. In both cases there was no way to message the person via GitHub because they'd not publically shared their email address. In one case there was no way to open an 'issue'. And in the other, it wasn't relating to a repo, but a really excellent tutorial.
In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.
Maybe GitHub should add an optional "Thanks" feedback channel, perhaps also include a place where users can submit success stories about their use of the given project. This could fill the role of a channel to express gratitude, and provide a place where prospective users could see how others have utilized the project successfully in the real world.
Managing OSS stuff really is brutal, and the amount of negative stuff you hear is hugely disproportionate to the amount of positive stuff. Anything to encourage the happy users to speak up once in a while can go a long way toward preventing OSS maintainers from burning out.
The Tailwind project is a great example of modern OSS done right. It's managed and organized very well, and not to forget about all the related quality content (videos, streams). You and your colleagues are a great inspiration. Sorry to hear that you're getting so much discouraging feedback.
Readit News
I've started to do this on a regular, almost daily basis.
If I come across something that sparks joy or interest - usually something I find here, on HN - I reach out to the author and let them know with a personal email.
I also sometimes offer a free-forever-no-strings-attached rsync.net account on the off chance that they would find that useful.
In reality, the Venn diagram of "people who write things that spark joy to the founder of rsync.net" and "people who aren't already self-hosting their own solution " is small.
But once in a while it really makes someones day ...
I have the displeasure of working with a team member who does the exact opposite: at every chance he gets, he expressed his displeasure regarding other team members to management. Once I confronted him about that behavior and he stated that those who fix problems get promoted while those who create them get passed over, and he believed that by pointing other people's flaws he would improve his chances of moving upward.
I firmly believe that's the main reason most people don't praise anyone else. If they do, they are calling out their competitor's positive contributions, while no one reciprocates in kind.
My basic point is this, even those with the wrong mindset can be swayed with the right mindset, as long as it is sincere.
I always try to praise a person. But I also want to "reserve all rights" to say that a codebase is crap or a choice made in the past was evidently a bad choice.
Finding the balance to critique work that a person contributed to, without criticising that person itself, is hard. A true challenge, I found.
It becomes even harder if a project is Open Source and you truly feel you have to "warn" people against using a solution in certain cases. It then becomes really hard not to sound like a grumpy old neckbeard or someone with a grudge. I lately decided it is best to just shut up, and let people find out themselves; to let them fail, fall or possibly succeed and prove me wrong instead. I do see the arrogance of that too, though.
The pro-social way out of the prisoner's dilemma's shitty equilibrium requires deliberate effort to foster the sort of personal trust and collaboration-by-default attitude that makes the 8+ work hours of every weekday of most of our lives not suck.
And it makes people feel good, which is personally enough for me (while recognizing the privilege that lets me say I have enough).
I’d hate to work with such an individual; I’d avoid them like the plague.
To me “good culture” is the de-emphasis of these kinds of mindsets (and emphasis of the opposite). To the point where it’s justification for hire/fire.
Pointing that something is wrong won't fix it, and if in the meantime you manage to ruin relationships within your team you have actively made things worse just to pretend being a good leader, but just proving you are an awful person to work with (and at this point you might still be wrong about your claim on what's wrong).
I delegated some areas during a big event and I took one of those persons asside because he was too rude.
He said that he pointed out mistakes ( which was correct, but they were new) and that they would remember it better if he was this direct. I just mentioned that he should not be this rude and just explain them what they did wrong and he adjusted. It was literally his mindset ( he adjusted that evening, not his mindset)
I realized that I am biased toward communicating things like feedback or suggestions.
Yet I do have many positive thoughts about others that I keep to myself. I don't know why I do this.
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1. Always publicly thank contributors for each unit of work I encountered, no matter how mundane, and especially when I recognized the value where it wouldn’t necessarily be visible/“hot” otherwise.
2. To make regular time for specific recognition of work that stood out to me, both public and direct, again especially highlighting important work that wouldn’t otherwise get a lot of light. (By now it should be obvious that I tend to work in libraries/infrastructure where good work tends to be mostly invisible.)
3. To try to continuously add visibility where work tended to be more foundational/less visible, so others would be encouraged to add to that recognition.
4. To make sure positive feedback was included wherever general or even critical feedback was warranted.
I’m not perfect and never perfected execution on those goals, but it was always an underlying part of how I interacted with my team. It improved my relationship with every team member who I most butted heads with (save one who was reflexively adversarial and invented conflict for even the tiniest work items; some people are just jerks!). And it also made a lot of people just generally more comfortable with their own contributions and better able to see their own value.
That may be good for team building and make some people feel better but, personally, I would find that situation very uncomfortable.
To me it’s embarrassing to be recognized publicly for literally doing what I am being paid to do. Instead, perhaps recognize each week the people that didn’t meet the standard:
“Wanted to recognize Bob this week for being a bit of a douche as well as letting all of us down when he messed up the build system and delayed our build delivery to QA and the Loc team thus having the rest of us having to scramble over the weekend to clean up the mess. Thanks Bob!”
I'm cringing just thinking of a team doing that.
It’s appropriate for a manager or team lead to do this. It’s not appropriate to make it the norm (even if it’s “optional”) for the whole team.
Much better for a leader to model the desired behavior, and, create space for those on the team, of their own volition and without peer pressure, follow suit.
It will also be much more authentic, real, and meaningful.
Also, I had a manager who would move everyone I praised off the team. He was paranoid about cliques.
That sounds awful
Unfortunately, explicit gratitude is very rare. Donations are even rarer. The "ask a question" and "support this site" buttons on my website are next to each other. I get 15 questions for every donation. About 30€ per 100 000 visitors, from 1-3 visitors. Those who email me with questions never donate. I'm not complaining about any of this, just illustrating my point: you can't use gratitude as a metric for the value of your work.
Critics, on the other hand, are disproportionately loud. As a community moderator, I learned that for every complainer, there are dozens of quietly happy users. You can only tell by the votes. No one will create a thread to say "everything is fine, keep it up".
If someone made your day easier, or if they created something good, take a minute to thank them. If they saved you a ton of work, consider a small donation. A lot of people are tirelessly, thanklessly creating things that benefit you. It costs nothing to acknowledge it. Never let a compliment go unused.
In the last few years, I became better at expressing my gratitude to creators, maintainers, colleagues and friends.
Can you ask them to? It's not exactly the same problem, but I have a modestly successful youtube channel, and I get unsolicited email questions seeking help every day, and I personally try and answer all that I can. I've used the following technique and it helped me receive donations to offset the support effort.
I added a quiet but clear call to action my support replies. It's in a smaller font and below the actual support reply, but it significantly increased the number of donations, and it helps offset my support time. I went from getting no donations, to donations on over 80% of the support questions I answer. Maybe this would work for you too.
Here is what I add at the bottom of help questions I receive:
----
As you might expect, I get a lot of requests for help. If you found my response helpful, a small donation for my time is totally optional, but appreciated so that I can continue to offer it as a service. http://buymeacoffee.com/boothjunkie
One of the major "metrics" that we track is how much a customer has to put effort in to fix an issue/ticket. This is measured via a survey that's sent out after ticket closure, but many customers never see it or choise not to respond.
A few months ago, I started adding a little post script "A survey is sent out after this case closes. I would appreciate it if you answered it!". Response rates for the survey jumped from 11% to 75%. Many of the responses were generally positive as well, trending our scores up by 11% and still climbing.
Sometimes asking nicely is a powerful tool, for good and potentially evil.
I was lucky enough to receive a thread exactly like this [0], in response to a user complaining about my support response time [1]. Admittedly, it was in response to me saying "No-one ever writes threads like this", but it was still lovely to receive.
0. https://groups.google.com/g/cursive/c/Zw8JExDavrE/m/HDILSRCj...
1. https://groups.google.com/g/cursive/c/wZOjmj2Jits/m/Iu7_6iuD...
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When I see 'support' on a website I think tech support not money support and blank it if I'm not looking for support. Might be just me, course!
I humbly hope that sharing this might inspire more humanity and gratitude in the open source community.
I suspect one reason is because the cloud vendors push hard for layer 7 routing, and cloud managed cert management. (ie: ALB and ACM.) These have a lot of vendor lock-in, whereas k8s layer 4 ingress and cert-manager do not.
One of my all-time favorite books -- "How to Want What You Have" by Tim Miller, PhD -- has as its central thesis the idea that:
1. Most people are relatively unhappy;
2. The root cause is our tendency always to want More [money/power, love, recognition] -- which stems from evolutionarily adaptive traits;
3. The remedy is to live in the present moment -- which one can learn to do by deliberately practicing three closely-related things:
The book is (sadly, inexplicably) out of print, but it's popular enough there are plenty of used copies for sale. I first encountered HTWWYH in a 5th-edition hardcover, and it was transformative. Highest posaible recommendation.https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/how-to-want-...
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One of the key things I believe most people forget is that being a free giver doesn't mean only to participate in charity and help those in need. It means to act like this to everyone, including those around us. Most people need encouragement and to feel appreciate, and I believe culturally we don't show enough of it.
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As an example, one of my most popular pages is a set of instructions on how to install 20 year old sewing machine software, that requires hardware keys, on modern Windows machines.
https://www.joeldare.com/wiki/installing_husqavarna_3d_embro...
I’m sure this will come in handy!
I do, then, immediately close "thank you" issues so owners are not tasked with responding in any way, but still... And for any watcher, I imagine they are interested in notifications relevant to actual issues, not thank yous.
My opinion is the current best way to say thank you is probably a star. Beyond that, it would be nice if GitHub added a way to leave a thank you or testimonial or something like that. Or even a formal "the repo is in use by such and such app/company."
I've deliberately not opened "Thank you" issues, because I didn't want to annoy the owner/watchers. Certainly frustrating there is no way to express gratitude.
As a developer what I like even more than thank yous are thank yous that explain how my code helped you in some specific way.
1. If you just wanna thank them, write an email
2. If you want to do so publicly, do so on a public channel (e.g. Blog post, HN, youtube channel, etc)
In person interaction naturally flows towards gratitude. Online interactions, like the one I’m having right now feels disposable. I don’t see your face and we can’t form much human connection.
This leads to an online world of shallow interactions that leave us feeling alone an empty. Much like what happens to people that live in large dense cities.
Our online interactions are so shallow, we feel it is the responsibility a product we are buying to facilitate a particular form of interaction as opposed to simply taking it upon ourselves to do it.
I do think there is a generational "thing" where older people tend to see online interactions as superficial and unreal, while younger people see them as a natural extension of the IRL social sphere. As a younger person, I find it easy to point out that interactions with strangers present similar difficulties whether online or IRL.
Yes, because it is, but I'd dispute the claim that GitHub discourages it. If anything, the people who use GitHub are more willing/most likely to misuse bugtracker for not just support requests but also general discussion and comments like this. It seems like there's a (non) issue like this that gets linked at least once a month on HN. I click through, get annoyed with the person who opened it, read the maintainer's response, get annoyed with their endorsement/encouragement of the idea, close the window, and then file it away in my mind or my bookmarks or both as an example of how annoying it is to try to collaborate with people whose platform of choice is GitHub.
Post this stuff on Twitter, or a mailing list, or a discussion board. Or at the very least, be productive and file a bug that says something like, "I wanted to express my gratitude for this project, but the README doesn't link to any public venues for general discussion". You know: things that at least attempt to pass themselves off as legitimate bugs? Or just don't do any of that and keep posting this sort of thing on GitHub--but in that case, please kindly also curb your and your colleagues' whinging in all future instances where you find that someone has chosen not to host on GitHub and, upon with being asked to, they say "no" and point to things like this as being among the reasons why GitHub users can't be trusted to make responsible use of project infrastructure.
I think this would be a nice new Category in Discussions; ":heart: Thank you"
I'm not sure that general purpose reviews/forums are the right way to address this issue, because those can generate negative feedback as easily as positive and generate additional stress for the maintainer. I think a simple dedicated "you can leave a public thank you message to the maintainer here if you want" text box would do the trick.
I just close the issue immediately after opening it. :)
Or perhaps just a built-in "endorsement" feature, which companies can use to indicate that they use a project and find it valuable, perhaps listed on the sidebar. Could also segue into paid sponsorship and support.
Insofar as GitHub provides package management, they could also prompt companies to endorse the packages they use.
All of this might get annoying, nasty, or inauthentic, of course. Would need to be careful...
IMO since GH tends to be somewhat aware of how people piggyback their platform, a README gratitude badge might be a good place to start. It can be as simple as a button click plus an optional prompt to add commentary. In fact, I might make this a smol project to see if it gets some traction.
After all, Github is more like a Social Coding Platform.
Indeed! It must equally feel inappropriate to close a gratitude issue.
Concretely, you answered your own question. The "star" button is the default way of saying "thanks" to a project which was useful to you.
> is it really considered so unusual for a someone to express gratitude to an open-source project?
I would say yes, it's very unusual. The general lack of basic civility is, in my opinion, just one more reason for the lack of diversity in projects and lowers the number of contributors to open source.
In the olden times, we all just used email all the time for everything. It would've been bizarre for someone to work in open source and not have their email publically available. The funny thing is, I haven't shared my email on my GitHub either! I'm going to fix that today.
[0]: https://github.com/greg7mdp/sparsepp/issues/17
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https://github.com/tailwindlabs/tailwindcss/discussions/cate...
Managing OSS stuff really is brutal, and the amount of negative stuff you hear is hugely disproportionate to the amount of positive stuff. Anything to encourage the happy users to speak up once in a while can go a long way toward preventing OSS maintainers from burning out.