It really sucks that culturally we're wired to only give feedback to developers or projects when things are broken.

A product with 15M users gets 100 complaints and only 1 nice "good job" message per month.

It's really demoralizing that we accepted the fact that "if you don't hear from them it means things are good".

People need positive reinforcement and to know that folks are happy about their work.

I understand it's fashionable to bitch about everything because hate brings views

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in reply to Aleca

based on how people respond to reviews of their work, i expect developers wouldn't care about the positive feedback at all. I understand and sympathize greatly with the difficulty of the experience you describe, don't get me wrong. the problem of lacking positive feedback is extremely personal for me, depression is depressing to talk about so I will leave it at that.
in reply to Aleca

In my experience, developers don't make it easy either. There are clear channels for bug reporting, but positive feedback seems out of place in a bug tracker (like, filing a praise report?). You have to look for an email or a chat, and sometimes those aren't as visible. You can leave a comment in Flathub, but there's nothing to show that the developer has read it.

So please, devs: you want to hear positive feedback? Enable channels for that, like you do for bugs or donations.

in reply to Aleca

@eikaron I was actually recently thinking of something like Issues on a repository but in reverse ie. tickets for things that actually work. Firstly, the devs would know they have done a really good job on a specific part of the software, secondly, if we kept to the step-by-step description antics, we could have a nice map of examples of what feature makes the product the right fit for whom in which situation.
in reply to Aleca

If you get 15M users on your "product" The money you get from said product is more than enough. You're already more privileged that 90% of people if you make money with a job like that, so no, you don't deserve a thank you. In the same way, I don't think you thank the people filling the shops you go to, or the people working for your city's basic infrastructure, because you assume payment is all that's needed.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)
in reply to TheFrenchGhosty

@TheFrenchGhosty wow...what an incredibly privileged and toxic statement.

I do thank the people I interact with. I always say hi to the shop workers and thank them when they help me.
I might be crazy in your eyes, but when I pass an intersection where a construction worker stops digging to let me cross, I thank him.

It's called being a decent human being and not assuming that "You're getting money so I can treat you like shit".

What kind of a sad world do you want to live in?

in reply to Aleca

Your argument boils down to virtue signaling.

You're a "Director of Product Engineering" at Mozilla (I didn't know that before). Your argument would actually be worth something if you were working for free (and not for 100 000+ a year - and I'm being generous considering you're literally corporate).

I did/do software as volunteer and got thanks. Here's the reality rich guy, a thank is almost worthless to me (and most of those people you mentioned) because it doesn't pay the bills.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)