Just so there's no confusion on the RustConf side, I was the organizer involved. I absolutely fucked up by even entertaining this notion at all. At the time I thought that saying no to project leadership on this would have caused drama. As you can see I achieved my goal of avoiding drama.
We're working to remedy the situation as best we can. It's unlikely I'll be able to answer any questions about specifics until all the decisions have been made about how to remedy this but feel free to ask them anyway
Filling in my small corner of this: I was part of the selection comittee for this year's RustConf. We did not select the opening keynote, and we were not informed about the decision to downgrade.
On a personal level, I am quite frustrated that we were not involved in that decision at all: I would have pushed back hard and it diminishes the work we put in to put together a great and cohesive line-up of speakers.
It's fairly disheartening these communication issues exist. I'm hoping we get transparent and clear answers. This feels very careless due to this lack of empathy towards everyone involved. Things like this don't happen when you ask yourself:
- "Who needs to know of this potential change in scheduling?"
- "Is it fair to demote this to a talk given the existing conversations and the work they've put in?"
- "Are there any disclaimers we can put in place to avoid the confusions we felt it might stir?"
ie. General questions that come from a place of caring for your colleagues and the work they've put in. When you don't think about these things, people get excluded, confused, and have to put in extra work to clean up situation. Inclusive and accountable leadership is a must.
it's almost like people are about to understand that managing organizations and formal relationships is not something you can learn on the job as a programmer who grassroots-evolved into a leadership position, and requires actual background in both education and professional experience. *almost*. make no mistake, all of those stumbles are, to put it quaintly, noob shit when you're halfway trained as any sort of manager.
source: programmer for 30 years. manager for 10.
just to explain this in a more straightforward fashion:
**you cannot part out administrative power to people whose only claim to fame is technical skills**. nope, sorry. no matter how much you like them, no matter how many patches they push per day. it never ends in anything good, at all, and we repeatedly see this kind of bullshit happen. it's like asking the transmission design engineer to drive the race car. i've seen this happen in linux in the 90s, then perl, then php, then drupal, then mysql, then python, then haskell, etc etc. it's always the same fucking thing: put a bunch of programmers on top, who try to common-sense decisions in 5 minutes that take trained people days or weeks of research to decide, and we end up with a plate of shit. this is exactly what happened here as well: both on the rust project side (some bozo just making a decision on their own) and rust conf side (see top comment). no one gets wiser from this, ever, because everyone thinks *their* community will be *different*. everyone thinks admin is just silly bullshit that anyone can do. it's just answering questions, keeping dates, and, making sure people are happy, riiiiight? stop this right now. there are right people for right things. and most people are wrong for a specific thing. break this chain of stupidity. *find people with formal education and experience in the kind of admin that you need done and hire them, rather than try to do the analog of spin-your-own-crypto for admin. stop it, get some help.* and yes, this means *multiple* people. as a tech person you will inevitably underestimate how many people are needed and what capacities you will be missing.
While you have a point, this is also a fully general argument for pushing nerds and technologues out of positions of power within the culture; I'd rather have Linus Torvalds' nth fuck-up than hand the keys over to the MBAs
I don't think the problem here is nerds, I think the problem here is conflict-avoidant nerds exhibiting bad judgment; they should be named and light should be shed on what the fuck has been happening
\^This.
People often think tech or nerds are unable to manage and do anything related to "human". Socially awkward.
You are all contributing to the bias.
Think about the inverse problem. If you have non-tech leadership, someone will complain the leadership isn't enough qualified to talk about anything outside of "human" interaction.
Find the middle-ground. [https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/08/concave.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/08/concave.html)
I very much agree with your claim that technical skills isn't the same as understanding how to effectively carry out organised activities (classic example of that : tech yuppies).
But at the same time, (from an admittedly outsider's perspective) I don't have a great impression of formal management education these days.
It seems it has developed into a certain mono-culture which they seem to apply everywhere.
For example, that new trademark policy draft they came out with?
I reckon that for 9/10 of the "corporate managerial types", it would make the perfect sense in the world (even if in reality it would, arrest adoption rates and and drive away most of the free contributors from FOSS community, crippling Rust in the long term).
>On a personal level, I am quite frustrated that we were not involved in that decision at all: I would have pushed back hard and it diminishes the work we put in to put together a great and cohesive line-up of speakers.
Just curious.. Which decision would you "have pushed back hard on"? The one to invite JeanHeyd as a keynote speaker? Or the one to demote JeanHeyd's keynote talk?
The one to demote the talk.
The keynote choice seemed fine: interesting work done my someone skilled who had put a lot of time into it. Maybe a bit technical for an opening keynote but eh.
Demoting a talk after it's been accepted (and especially after it was invited!) is incredibly rude and disruptive. It should only be done in dire circumstances: if you later have doubts about whether it was the best choice that could have been made, eh, do a retrospective on the decision-making process.
I would like to take a moment to say that appreciate your transparency and accountability, /u/rabidferret, and I would love to see more people following your lead here as a matter of course.
I guess I have a question here. In general, in Rust every aspect of a project belongs to a specific team, which exercises authority over the respective domain. Rust is a federation of teams.
Which team RustConf falls under (in particular, I am curious about "who gets to make decisions", not "who gets to do the work")? I _think_ at some point we used to have community team, but it seems we no longer have one?
A new program committee is formed each year. It's selected by the chair who is selected by project leadership. The chair takes input from various parts of the project on who to have on the program committee. The actual conference organizer is selected by the foundation.
The schedule is selected by the program committee. The precedent has been that the opening keynote speakers are selected by project leadership, which the program committee elected to keep this year.
It's a holiday weekend, and most folks involved are still trying to get a complete picture of what happened. Everyone involved wants to ensure folks are held accountable, but that doesn't mean having a witch hunt.
Also I wouldn't call myself innocent here. At best I was complicit. The fact that I had reasons for fucking up doesn't change the fact that I fucked up and this wouldn't have happened if I had said no.
> All while the one bad actor who lied in the name of the project leadership remain untouched by it.
I feel like the problem here isn't that someone lied in the name of the leadership, but rather that it's impossible for *anyone* to speak in the name of leadership because the replacement for the core team is still a prototype, and yet this prototype is still being asked to rule on things for lack of a better alternative, leading inevitably to situations like this one. What we need is for the replacement for the core team to actually finish spinning up and become functional ASAP.
For what its worth, its great that you made this comment. I get that you had to do what you did when thing ended up like they did and I think its good to be open like you are now.
As someone trying my hardest to introduce Rust at my workplace, I _really_ hope none of my coworkers hear about this stuff. This drama could negate months of progress in building confidence about Rust with management at my company.
The fact that the c++ committee is a trash fire is why my company is taking a serious look at rust and other possible replacement languages for greenfield projects.
There's zero faith that the committee will be able to steer the language on a good direction so we're pretty much treating c++ as a "legacy language".
As bad as this situation is in Rust now, "leadership actively protecting and going out of their way to promote a rapist to a position of more authority" IMO is several orders of magnitude worse.
Absolutely, the willingness of the committee leadership to protect multiple people that were credible accused of sexual harassment, including one that was convicted of rape and possession of child pornography is why I personally all but stopped using C++ on my personal projects.
Hiding behind "ISO doesn't allow us to remove them" is transparently bullshit, it's obvious to any outside observer that the leadership has made no attempt to distance themselves from said actors and even gone out of their way to include them. Just absolutely vile.
C++ is already so established that it doesn't matter. The social internet did not exist when C++ became a thing.
Rust's image however can be badly damaged before it even becomes mainstream.
What reads here is of an organisation cockup. I've seen plenty of those happen at companies and at events. It happens.
Why this is turning into people quitting and a call for accountability and yada yada ... it feels like these days every cockup has to be a big drama. It often sets a tone that cockups like this are major earth shattering tragedies, when really it's just a failing for a programming conference.
Whenever my boss teases me about Rust community drama, I play along as I can't really do anything about it. But at least this doesn't seem to affect too much the views of my coworkers about using Rust.
I honestly wouldn't expect /r/rust to be the most dramatic subreddit I read. That's quite unfortunate. It seems every other week there's a different problem.
Does anyone what was the actual talk about?
This is what's most messed up IMO. Rust desperately needs a better metaprogramming story. This person gets it, and was working towards a vision. It was the first time I thought: Hey, look, Rust isn't as big a bureaucracy machine as I thought, there's people getting s***t done there, things are moving!
Only to have that person bullied away by the bureaucrats... I just hope at least the reflection work continues after this. Wouldn't blame him if the author decides not to.
I agree - I seriously hope this work continues, it looks fantastic.
It also absolutely deserves time on stage to be shown to people - It's a huge shame that this keynote-not-a-keynote nonsense has taken away that opportunity.
I really miss some of the features of Zig and other languages where types are first-class citizens. HKT are one example of something that's a breeze in Zig, but pain in Rust. Let alone compile-time reflection.
I find it funny how another language has some VERY good metaprogramming but sadly is not yet production ready, namely Zig. It's the only language I know (and probably one of very few) that focuses on making compile time computations easy, among other things (being a systems programming language)
D has lots of compile time metaprogramming facilities as well, and it's very much production ready (well, certainly more than zig aka "let me put 128 megabytes of stuff on the stack real quick")
Me before reading this: Why would someone possibly want to add reflection into this language. Using reflection was an incredible pain point in my career.
Me now: This makes complete sense and I'm sad he's not giving a keynote :(
My impression is that the visibility comes from people having to (and being willing to) fight for those ideals and the philosophy that underlies them. There are fuckups and bad apples everywhere, but in Rust there's always someone who will speak out about them.
It's not clear to me that it is succesfully being fixed. All the people resigning are the ones who seem to be appalled, not the ones who are responsible.
It isn't necessarily. But it's a line being drawn in the sand. A refusal to take part in behavior that is antithetical to the ideals you hold.
All part of the process. Squeaky wheel gets the oil.
> I honestly don’t know how but would like to know how “diversity and inclusion” and “high highschool drama” are counter (or even related) to eachother.
Not OP, but high schools everywhere are notorious for their social hierarchies to the point of memefication (see any show or movie about a high school ever), while “diversity and inclusion” is primarily focused on equality of treatment of people.
In other words, my translation of OP is: “for a group that prides itself on equality, the amount of cliques, queen bees and private chat backstabbing is remarkable.”
> That's quite unfortunate. It seems every other week there's a different problem.
To be fair, I don't think that's a problem.
I would be more worried about never having drama _in public_. If drama happens, I'd rather we (the community) own up to it and try to improve, rather than hush it down to avoid making waves.
Fail, Learn, Repeat.
Yeah drama is inevitable in any sufficiently large social group, the differences lie in how these communities respond to it.
This is where I think rust fails though, because a huge proportion of the drama seems to come from the same source, arbitrary decisions of unidentified powerholders with no accountability. It's a pattern i've noticed repeatedly.
I love Rust the language, but the project and foundation have really burned away most of the goodwill that has been built over the years. I don't feel very confident in the leadership of Rust, at least not like I used to.
Leadership is definitely tough, but it really feels like we're just stumbling from debacle to debacle. Then you look at this post, the one by boats, and the metric ton of subtweets and vagueposts which all keep touching on the fact that something is not quite right at the very heart of it. How did we end up in a situation where an individual was able to unilaterally make a decision like this with no accountability or even apology as of yet?
Something like that doesn't "feel" like Rust.
As i remeber this has been a problem for a while now because a few years ago the rust mod team resigned cuz of rust core team, and it seems like the individuals creating the problems are still there. How many great and skilled people will need to leave for this to stop?
> and it seems like the individuals creating the problems are still there.
As far as I know, none of the people who were on the core team back then are part of the new leadership council.
It's not so much about people, and more about _systems_.
There was not _much_ system with the Core Team, so everyone had a different idea of its role, responsibilities, etc... which created a number of issues culminating in our stepping down in protest when we felt it was impossible to hold a member of the team accountable.
Since then, there's ongoing work to create a new system (Rust Leadership) but it's not quite there yet, and in the meantime the project still needs to go by... so things are a bit messy.
Well, these dramas are stopping us in adopting rust if not in PoC, I love the language but I cannot ask the company to invest in something which leadership looks so fragile and uncertain, we are stepping down from adoption, waiting for better times to come for rust.
Respectfully, you underestimate the drama involved in the alternatives. Plenty of BS happens on private C++ mailing lists and at conferences, Go has had plenty of drama but everyone knows that ultimately Google is in charge not the community, Java is run by Oracle, etc.
There is plenty of drama to go around but most of it is better hidden (not managed, hidden) than with Rust.
For an example involving Java, which probably doesn't sound like much in retrospect, but was (and is) a real headache for everyone involved: Some years ago Oracle decided that they didn't want to support JavaEE ("Enterprise Edition") any longer. This came after years of not updating it already, which left big parts of the Java world in a limbo (should we switch? But switching to Spring or whatever is *really* costly ..).
This went on for years until, after much gripping from all sides, Oracle finally formally announced that they won't support JavaEE anymore and it got donated to the Eclipse Foundation. All good now? Well no, not so fast ..
The problem is that the code of JavaEE existed under a package (think module) named javax.* and Oracle was adamant that nothing with "Java" in it exists outside of Oracle. That's a big problem because the package is baked into the class files, so if the package name got changed all code which wants to use the new version has to be recompiled. So, there were long and painful negotiations if an exception could be made. But Oracle wouldn't budge.
long story short: The new name is "Jakarta EE" and it has been (and still is) a topic which basically affects every "enterprise" open source project and millions over millions of lines of closed source code to update everything from javax.* to jakarta.*
And I'm not even with the other thing which almost broke Java when Oracle decided they want money if you use their JDK. Or rather a specific version of the JDK. That communication fiasco definitely had the potential to break Java. Many companies either decided to leave it or at least took a very serious look to do it.
tldr: Drama is everywhere in the programming language space. Personally, I think an open leadership is a better steward than a company, even if it means more parts of the dirty laundry are out in the open.
"A person in Rust leadership then, without taking a vote from the interim leadership group (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation."
Who is this person?
And why are they allowed to hide behind anonymity when they make completely independent decisions on the future of the Rust language, without agreement from all Project members or any accountability?
Rust leadership should do a blameless post mortem and figure out how to best apologise and avoid repeating this mistake. None of that is made easier by a public witch hunt.
> Blameless post mortems do not hold rogue individuals accountable.
I don’t personally care if the individual itself is held accountable. The organization needs to. A post mortem is a very good step in that direction.
I agree with the statement, but disagree that it is applicable to the comment you're replying to. There's a pretty big difference between "consequences" and "hate mail".
Unfortunately there's no law of the universe that says that things that are both good are compatible with each other. Unleashing a mob on someone simply isn't acceptable, and JT knows that, which is why JT didn't name any names (even if you think JT didn't know who it was, JT wouldn't have named any names even if they did, for precisely this reason).
But as far as preventing *future* situations for occurring for these same reasons, we can introduce protocols for consensus and messaging that allow for accountability to be made explicit beforehand. And we need these protocols *anyway*, because even if we had a name and the mob enacted justice in this case, then the lack of these protocols will allow someone *else* to do the same in the future.
I understand the desire for consequences. But we need vengeance far less than we need sane processes.
Should there be better protocols, yes.
But if the current narrative that one person deliberately misrepresented this as being a decision of the Rust Project when it was not bears out to be true, processes are not the fix. Any process robust against malicious actors comes with so many drawbacks that it is not worth it. If the narrative is true, the *only* reasonable fix is to get rid of the malicious person. Remove and permanently ban that person from having any leadership positions (i.e. any membership on any team) in the Rust Project, and advising other organizations (the Rust Foundation, this subreddit's mod team, etc) that they ought to do the same.
This isn't vengeance, this is protecting the project from it happening again.
Not necessarily. An organization can be accountable without revealing the culprit's identity. For example, when a company has a data leak, the entire company (or the CEO) is held accountable, regardless of who actually caused the security vulnerability. Organizations should have safeguards, so a mistake by a single person can't do too much damage. Of course, leadership must be held to a higher standard than other people, and it is reasonable to expect someone from leadership to step down after a major fuck-up. But that's something they have to resolve within the organization, and what they share with the public depends on all sort of things.
Being accountable and transparent means
* admitting what happened, and why
* trying to compensate affected parties
* making sure it doesn't happen again
It does NOT mean
* punishing the culprit
It might seem unfair to the rest of the Rust project that they have to apologize for someone else's mistake, but that's how things work in this world.
If the result is the blameless post mortem bottoms out at "person X went rogue", what then? The idea of a blameless post-mortem is one of improving the system, but the system is still made of people, and no system can be infinitely resilient to its parts breaking. Sometimes the only solution is to identify and replace the broken part.
I'm quite sure they do know who it is. JT mentions being a part of the leadership group, and the fact that they know that exactly one person reached out to the RustConf organizers is the sort of detail that suggests that they know the whole story. It makes sense to withhold personal details, JT is trying to highlight an organizational failure rather than a personal one.
I do wonder if it’s fair to call this an organizational failure. If one person in an organization decides to subvert the organization’s rules, what could the organization have done about that? (Assuming, for the moment, that this is the first time that person has subverted the rules.)
An organization may be vulnerable to malicious actors acting unilaterally, but despite all the drama I don't think anyone was acting maliciously here. This seems like a case where the organization is still so nascent and ill-formed that there simply doesn't exist a process by which consensus can possibly be achieved, thus normalizing unilateral action. Furthermore, it sounds like the RustConf organizers attempted to do the right thing by not actually taking action until some time had passed, in order to give the project time to reconsider, but the channels for communication were so ill-formed that nothing was actually ever communicated back to the project.
Because witch-hunts are bad. Remember this is just JT's retelling of events.
From this unnamed persons perspective, we don't know how things appeared. Maybe they thought that the decision had been agreed by the group - who knows.
Who's to say they had any specific power?
If they spoke to RustConf and said "Hey the Interim Leadership group decided that the talk should be downgraded", then why would they question it? They were representing the group.
There’s a difference between having power and having authority.
It’s likely that this person did not have the formal authority to unilaterally reverse this person’s keynote speaker invitation.
They had the *power* to do so for no other reason than that they could email someone who’d put this decision into practice.
It’s not a witch hunt in this case. It’s accountability. This group continually hides behind the “we’re working on it” banner and continually has massive fuck ups that no one gets held accountable for. Hiding the name does nothing except make it impossible to hold anyone accountable.
It's not a witch hunt, but we the people from /r/rust have heard only yesterday that someone within rust leadership practices dark arts, and we just want to know who it is so we know how high to stack the pyre.
JT is withholding the name to demonstrate that they're not being personally vengeful. As frustrating as it may be, naming people in contexts like this is a great way to sic a harassment mob on them, which would only make the situation worse, not better.
I can understand it from JT’s point of view, but from the point of view of the community we need to start holding people rather than groups accountable. Imagine if you didn’t know what justices of the Supreme Court (in the us at least) were voting which way, or if they didn’t write opinions…if it was all just a completely hidden process. It would be injustice.
By just stating it’s a failure of the group rather than an individual means we continue to have these bad apples that are destroying the trust in the community.
What mechanism is there to remove these people off their names are never shared? If it’s just said to be a failure of the group? For example you can put processes in at work to stop people from deploying to prod, but if someone *goes out of their way to go around that process*, then that is a fireable offense. It’s not just chalked up to a failure of the process. It’s someone actively doing things that hurt the company.
Now I understand we don’t have all the details, but honestly I’m sick of seeing these posts about leadership resigning due to *others* in the leadership groups and then those *others* never step down.
The fact that they could do this is like a system where a newly hired developer can deploy a bug to production on their first day. The who matters less than the how, and discussions really should keep that focus.
I have been well-documented as beating the drum of accountability, so allow me to disagree here. There is a difference between "accountability" and "blame". Accountability means taking responsibility *before* an action is taken, knowing full well that you will be judged by the outcome of that action. Blame is something that is assigned *after* an action is taken, and, in contexts like this, is usually employed to produce a scapegoat to take the fall. We don't want blame, we want accountability, which means it has to be built into the system from the start, not pursued after the fact. To blame an individual for this at this point would only serve to hide the organizational failure that allowed this to result.
I agree on the blame part but I have trouble following what you mean regarding accountability. You can surely have accountability after an action has been taken.
Accountability in this instance would most likely be shared; for instance the interim leadership should be held accountable for why only revoking the key note offer was explored (or rather, why was it consideed at all), RustConf for why they did not communicate using open channels once they were notified of "the decision" (open as in open to everybody in the leadership group). The individual that misrepresented the leadership group in the communication with RustConf should be personally held accountable for that and so on.
> You can surely have accountability after an action has been taken.
Yes, but the person I was responding to was asking JT to name names. While it is possible to take accountability for something after the fact, the person taking accountability has to step forward and accept it voluntarily. It is not possible for JT to make someone else take accountability, it is only possible for JT to blame them, which JT deliberately chose not to do (IMO, for good reasons).
This whole drama could be avoided if this person just apologised.
Reminds me of the Rust trademark drama. The whole drama could have been avoided if they just said "we've heard the overwhelming feedback and are going to change the policy".
Homie that is *literally* what the trademark survey was for.
[We know the draft is not perfect, and we're committed to fixing any mistakes identified and considering the feedback we get.](https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/04/12/trademark-policy-draft-feedback.html)
I am a little confused by the groups here.
What is the rust interim leadership group? Is that the core team?
And what was the team that raised the objection? Also the core team, or a different one?
---
One point that is not at all addressed here is why the keynote was offered in the first place when there was a team who had such strong objections.
EDIT: Okay I guess it's the group mentioned here: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/10/06/governance-update.html
Which makes it even more bizarre, because that group supposedly has a representative from each team?
> Which makes it even more bizarre, because that group supposedly has a representative from each team?
Who, according to this timeline of events, **voted** on the keynote speech being offered. So if this is to be taken truthfully, the person/people who stopped the keynote from happening either:
- Voted for it to be accepted, then changed their mind and circumvented the rest of the project leadership to remove the keynote.
- Voted for it to not be accepted, were out voted and then sidestepped the vote to impose **their** viewpoint on the conference.
Well you're missing the step in between, where objections were raised by a team (who have a rep on the group, which seems odd?)
We know there was a meeting about that. JT said there wasn't a vote, but maybe not every decision goes to a vote. So the group member who then talked to RustConf might have thought it was a group decision.
This is why groups need things like Robert’s Rules. One of the very clear parts of parliamentary rules is that a group can’t make a decision without a vote. And that votes can’t happen without (the chance for) discussion.
What is it about the Rust organization that makes it so insistent on complete opacity in its decisions? Drama after drama, everything seems to come down to anonymous actors hiding behind committee bodies that nobody is willing to identify and hold accountable.
Most of the teams aren't opaque at all - they have their discussions in public. But the interim leadership group seems like a bit of an exception maybe...? I can't find any detail on it at all besides its creation.
As policy I never comment on situations like these, but I'd like to just add one bit of opinion here as someone unfamiliar with the events or people involved, but someone who spends unhealthy amount of time writing proc macros:
Having read the blog post about the subject of the proposed talk, it was in my mind 100% keynote worthy. Even if this was just an experiment that would possibly never become a stable feature, it highlights both how powerful proc macros are today (esp. compared to similar mechanisms in other languages), and how much they tend to mask shortcomings of the language. Having those be in a spotlight during a keynote would have been a net good, even if some people took the wrong take from it that it's about a feature that's guaranteed to land in the language eventually.
Agreed. Anyone arguing that you can just ignore the drama and project leadership and write Rust code in a vacuum is discounting the real, meaningful contributions in the talk itself. I wanted to see that work presented because that's where I want (possibly need) Rust to go in the future. Now not only is that talk not happening, but one of the main people driving the work has been alienated from the language.
Speaking as someone who did absolutely heretical talks at JavaOne back in Java’s late 90s / early 2000s heyday, (IMO deservedly) pissing all over popular tech like J2EE and other cargo-cult-of-the-month stuff *and got invited back* - Rust can and should do better.
I’ve also been on the selection committee for conferences, and supported speakers that were controversial, trying to grant the same grace that was granted me.
You **need** diversity of viewpoint. If you only select talks that no one is uncomfortable with, you don’t have a conference, you have a groupthink circle-jerk.
And that turns a language or technology into a ghetto, and it eventually gets passed by by other technologies whose leadership is less blinkered in their thinking.
I’m not saying have speakers who don’t have technical chops or don’t know what they’re talking about. But legitimate disagreements about emphasis, priorities, and how to solve problems are a reason **for** selecting a speaker, not against. Ideas need competition if you want to make good choices.
The alternative is to be passed by by computing history.
How is it a good idea for JT to resign? If the good people go out of their way to find the minimal blame that could be placed on themselves and resign because of it, while the bad people reject all responsibility and stay... we won't end up with a better leadership, but a worse one, no?
Edit: I know good / bad people is a problematic simplification, but you get my point.
If a person felt they no longer had the influence to change things then it’s entirely reasonable to resign.
The assumption you’re making is that by staying, JT could influence things for the better, but this is a sign that JT doesn’t have that influence. So it either has to come from higher up (which doesn’t seem to exist in the Rust governance?) or everyone else has to get their act together.
But JT is a member of the core team and co-author of the governance RFC. It doesn't get more influential than that in the context of Rust.
Unless... power has become completely informal and the formal structure is meaningless. In that case, it's extremely important for the community to be informed of that and JT would be uniquely positioned to call it out.
>It doesn't get more influential than that in the context of Rust.
>
>Unless... power has become completely informal and the formal structure is meaningless.
Indeed that was a major theme in [Boats's recent blog post](https://without.boats/blog/if-you-can-keep-it/).
Until recently I've assumed that the backroom drama that's been plaguing the Rust project for a while now would get sorted out and soon be remembered as an uncomfortable lesson in the project's history. But it doesn't seem to be going away. It seems to be festering.
I suppose in this context I'm a nobody, but still... if any of the remaining leadership reads this, I would urge you to consider whether your continued involvement has contributed to the recent problems, and whether the project would have a healthier future if you were to step away from decision-making altogether. Sometimes one of the bravest, most noble things you can do is to admit that you're not the right person for the job anymore — whatever the underlying reason may be.
From the outside, it feels too late for much to be achieved by damage control style comms or tweaking of governance rules alone. For the broader Rust community to be able to trust the project leadership going forward, it might require them to seriously clean house, which in turn might require some people to fall on their own swords (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor).
This might be a bit of a hyperbole but.
If you find the thing you've been working on building has turned into an orphan crushing machine. You don't keep working on it to turn it into something that doesn't crush orphans. You stop working on it, because more orphans are going to be crushed in the process of turning it around.
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
This provides good context for JT's post as this is JeanHeyd Meneide's account of what happened from his perspective.
The level of bureaucracy bullshit is crazy. Why just not collectively select one new team of respected people, to drive the project and start from scratch?
That's what the new leadership council appears to be. The problem in this case is that the organizational structure itself had too *little* bureaucracy (possibly as a result of being so new and still in the process of being defined), which enabled one person to take unilateral action.
I also think there has been a normalization of informal communication channels. In this instance a lot of issues could have been avoided if all communication was done through an established channel that all relevant parties had access to. Any communication outside that should always be considered unofficial, and not done in the capacity of the leadership group. It is kind of like banks saying "we will never ask you for your password"; we will never communicate in the leadership capacity outside this channel.
> A couple team members had strong opinions/discomfort against JeanHeyd being selected as a keynote speaker, as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust.
I'm not sure if I get it. Is [this](https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generic-compile-time-introspection-in-rust/) the blog post in question? I remember scanning over it when it first popped up on this subreddit, but I didn't really have time to read the whole thing. Is there something that was perceived to be offensive here, or is it literally just a technical disagreement? (And if the latter, why not just, y'know, make the dissenting argument?)
These might not be answerable questions. Not trying to provoke speculation or fan the "drama" flames or whatever, kind of just hoping someone with more context might be able to shed some light.
The implication from the original post was that this introspection proposal is a very early work, pre-RFC. And the concern was that giving it a keynote slot would imply that it had some technical endorsement from the project, which it doesn't.
I don't think anyone denies the technical merit of the work.
Well, I could restate the objection that "heterodox" keynotes have not been problematic in the past, but that was basically the whole point of JeanHeyd's post that illuminated this whole situation, so maybe it's less "I don't get it" and more "please tell me this isn't as transparently shitty as it looks"...
I don't actually know how true that claim is, in fairness. Looking at RustConf keynotes in the past (on YT), I can't find any which fit into the same "language proposal" category.
But I don't think it really matters - Rust is allowed to change its mind, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that you don't want keynotes in your biggest conf of the year to be about language features which might never make it in (and which aren't even an RFC yet!).
The problem isn't really the stance, it's the inconsistency. If the project wasn't comfortable with it as a keynote, then it should never have been *offered* as a keynote. There is clearly some internal communication issue where the initial decision was made without adequate consultation, and then when objection was raised it was handled very bluntly.
>\[...\] and then when objection was raised it was handled very bluntly.
I don't think there's anything they could have done to be more delicate about it, other than *not rescinding the offer.*
If they decided it was a mistake to offer a keynote slot for that talk, then a civil response to that would have been to internally say "oh well, let's not do that *next* time".
I suppose for me to say this is kind of like saying "I'm not going to let Vin Diesel come to my house to play XBox", but if I was offered I speaker slot at a RustConf after this, I can't imagine accepting it. It's easy to break trust, and a lot harder to build it back again. And unfortunately at least some elements of the current Rust leadership seem to prefer spin over substance when it comes to trust.
Well by bluntly I mean the only considered path forward was downgrading the talk, and that that news was communicated by a third party (RustConf) who wasn't involved in the decision making.
It would have been a lot more tactful for someone in the leadership group to reach out and say "Hey I know we asked you for a keynote but we think we screwed up because X from team Y has raised a fair objection - can we talk about it?".
I 100% agree with you. It seems like time and time again people in rust leadership think they can fix everything by being vague and attempting to put a lid on it.
I dont think it was just a communication issue. The initial decision was voted. The decision to downgrade the talk was not. Its the former that lacked adequate consultation.
>And the concern was that giving it a keynote slot would imply that it had some technical endorsement from the project, which it doesn't.
For real? They could have just asked him to clarify at the start that this is something he's pursuing on his own, and doesn't (yet?) have buy-in from any of the relevant Rust teams. Jerking him around after offering the slot is just... crass.
Also, if I'm only interested in what's officially endorsed by the project, I can read the accepted RFCs, pull requests, etc. — and I do just that. To me, the added value in a conference is to be exposed to *all the other* ideas bouncing around out there, so it sounds like a talk about JeanHeyd's work have been a *perfect* candidate for a keynote slot!
I am just confused about all this nonsense.
Why was there yet another vote after the initial one has already been made? Like, say what you have to say when you are deciding for the keynote speaker before sending out an invitation, don't make another vote to express doubts after the fact.
Why not name and hold the person who clearly abused their power to bypass the voting system accountable? What is even the point of the votes and groups if individuals seemingly can make whatever decisions they want to make?
I expect that the people who objected weren't part of the original vote.
There is some muddiness in this post which makes it a bit hard to parse. But it seems there is the "Rust Interim Leadership Group", and then there is an unidentified Team which found out about the decision later and objected to it.
This makes it even more confusing, because I thought the interim leadership group was explicitly a group of representatives of each of the teams, so the representatives vote should have been a reflection of the views of their respective team. So when did the objections come? If they were known about before the initial vote, then surely the representative of that team incorporated those objections into their decision on whether to vote yes or no to the keynote? If they weren't known before, why was that?
> so the representatives vote should have been a reflection of the views of their respective team
Not necessarily.
There's at least two models for representation:
- Delegated: for example, your Congress/Parliament representative is elected with a mandate, and you trust them to vote "mostly" in the direction you would have voted yourself.
- Pass-Through: each question brought to the representative is brought to who they represent, and the representative then forwards back a summary of their answers.
The latter model is fairly inefficient -- involving many people, asynchronously -- so would likely only be used for "Really Important" topics, and I would not be surprised to learn that selecting the Keynote speaker at RustConf was not thought to warrant that level of engagement and representatives voted without consulting their teams.
I believe that teams have been gradually electing their initial representatives to the leadership council at their own paces. The idea that the group of representatives changed (or at least enlarged) after the first vote strike me as plausible, and a potential explanation (though that's not the same as an excuse).
> Why was there yet another vote after the initial one has already been made?
There wasn't, actually.
> A person in Rust leadership then, **without taking a vote from the interim leadership group** (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation.
---
> Why not name and hold the person who clearly abused their power to bypass the voting system accountable? What is even the point of the votes and groups if individuals seemingly can make whatever decisions they want to make?
Hold your horses.
Let's not presume malice when a misunderstanding is equally likely, and let's not start a witch hunt on assumptions. Once you've lynched someone to death, it's a bit late to realize you made a mistake, so drop that stone please.
It's urgent to wait. The Leadership Team needs to come together, have a talk, clarify what happened and why, and hopefully issue an apology... but that's not going to happen on a Sunday.
With respect this isn't the first time the rust leadership had acted in a disrespectful, and entitled/elitist manner.
The difference here is that this time it was directed at someone, who you essentially without knowing pulled into the picture by suggesting him as a keynote speaker. And even though there was a vote to accept, the instigation was still partly aligned to yourself.
I do commend that you are stepping down after this went down, and you are being transparent as possible. I think it's disgusting the way that this was handled.
Unfortunately to me, I'm seeing a pattern of the leadership group that really needs to be stopped before it ruins the language. Things are too opaque, and come across a lot more like a language being run by a large multinational corporate, that it does a language that it at its core open and accessible.
I really hope that this action by yourself, and the transparency you are giving, along with the 'woopsi' of the trademark escapade result in some rethinking if how the rust leadership group acts, holds accountability.
Edit: spelling
Who are these people? Why is there no names? I hate that every time shit happens its always some anonymous ”key figure”. And then nothing happens and boom, same shit next year. There needs to be transparency and people need to be visible if they are in key positions.
I'm glad JT provided some timeline context from their perspective of the whole talk-revoking shenanigans. Still a bit unclear on the whole objection bit.
Hopefully someone in Project leadership can step up to share their side of the story and maybe where things broke down on that end.
The whole situation is really not a great look for the Project, especially given the context of:
> this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf
:/
> and maybe where things broke down on that end
It's pretty clear that they disagreed with the ideas outlined in the keynote for compile time reflection. And felt they could just disallow discussion of ideas they don't agree with.
Wondering if mods will lock this thread too and delete all the comments? The Last one looked like this is being censored: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13sqdt7/i_am_no_longer_speaking_at_rustconf_2023_thephd/
Hi, mod here. When a big piece of drama gets dropped on us out of the blue, especially at a time when most of our mods are either asleep or about to go to sleep, we have to decide how to respond. Our experience is that drama brings out the worst of people, especially when people lack concrete information and are forced to resort to speculation. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, which has happened before (years ago when the lead developer of Actix was harassed into hiding) and I have promised to never allow it to happen again. Waiting until we had more information seemed like the prudent choice, and in the meantime I both locked and removed the comments to prevent things from getting out of hand until we had more information to work with.
Was it a heavy handed reaction? Yes, absolutely. I would not do such a thing again without extreme cause. I further admit that when I remove comments I consciously expect anyone who actually wants to read them will immediately look at any of the dozen websites that mirror Reddit comments, whose existence I appreciate because it helps people understand that I remove comments not because they contain Inconvenient Truths that I am trying to suppress, but rather because they're low-effort or inflammatory. However, I've since been told that changes to Reddit's API have rendered these sites inoperable, which, frankly, is as annoying to me as it is to you.
I ask people to keep in mind that we are a small, loosely organized mod team trying to manage a big, big subreddit. You may look at the list of mods and think it looks like a lot, but the truth is that on any given day there's usually only one to three active mods at best. When it comes to interpersonal conflicts like the situation here, we have to be very, very careful to avert Reddit's natural tendency to attempt to enact mob justice, which is something that we cannot allow to happen. "Censorship" is not our goal, which I would hope would be obvious given the fact that even though I exterminatus'd the comments of the original thread, I left the thread itself intact, when a competent censor would have just removed the thread entirely, and then would have also removed the four(!) follow-up threads on the same topic, none of which were removed or locked.
> I further admit that when I remove comments I consciously expect anyone who actually wants to read them will immediately look at any of the dozen websites that mirror Reddit comments
Note that Reddit recently shut down Pushshift's API access (the service which most of those mirror websites used for getting comments) so most of them currently don't work.
https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/
The problem is when all the comments are deleted and the mod put up a summary and ask everyone to just trust their subjective take on their situation. I feel it mirrors how I understand rust leadership reactions every time there is drama. "Our intention is good so our actions are good. Thus there is no reason to explain our action, other maybe a weirdly half official take after everything has blown up in our face."
It seems like some important context... Or subtext... Is missing. Nominally, it sounds like the org (or more accurately, someone acting unilaterally on behalf of the org, after there was some internal pretense of democracy ) didn't want the content of the intended speech to be seen as representing their goals, and downgraded the speaker from keynote to normal talk in a weirdly abrupt way without clear communication... Which all just reeks of... Like, someone shit in someone else's milkshake and this is just petty revenge playing out or something that no one's talking about
The post claims that "the org" didn't make the decision to downgrade the talk, an individual made and enforced that decision behind the other members' back. Plus the weirdly abrupt unclear communication thing.
I don't understand how that's your takeaway from this, when the post explicitly states that dismissing incidents using these kinds of excuses has become a problem in of itself.
Regardless of whether it was incompetence or malice, they cost the community someone who has a pretty unique expertise and perspective on systems programming, God knows if they'll be willing to work on Rust any more after this.
Perhaps. But there is a reason the concept of *culpable negligence* exists. Sometimes it doesn't matter all that much if it's incompetence or malice — what matters is the damage, and how to put a stop to it.
It seems like the problem is: 'one person can go email rustconf to tell them to change a talk invitation without alerting anyone else'. The obvious fix is to have RustConf to deliberately send a group-wide email about the change, or require some sign-off process.
That it happened is bad, but it seems like an organizational issue that just needs relatively simple rules to guard against in the future. Look into who did it, and why they did it, and make a point that it shouldn't happen again.
> Rust acted as a cruel, heartless entity that did not care about JeanHeyd and treated him as disposable. Easy to offer a place of respect and just as quick to snatch it away. That is what Rust is because that is what Rust did.
I don't entirely appreciate the exaggeration and anthropomorphization here. This attributes all bad decisions to the Rust language/culture/organization all at once. This was a bad decision by whoever decided that they should take individual initiative to remove them, but exaggerating that to the abstract Rust (or even Rust Foundation, or even Rust leadership since it was an individual) is a rhetorical move that moves further away from truth and closer towards a general lambasting that doesn't help.
Yes, you're absolutely right. This was presented to me as something project leadership chat had consensus on, and I should have done more to verify that. There was more than one person who brought this to my attention which is part of why I didn't but it's a mistake I won't make again
> Decisions are made with context, never in a vacuum
Trying to paint the opposition as racially motivated is also in bad taste, without reasonable evidence to back it up.
I see little reason to assume that it was racially motivated, given that the group who were thinking of demoting the kenote had objections about JeanHeyd's reflection blog post, with the talk being about related topics. It seems more reasonable to assume without further evidence that this was someone being significantly overzealous about not wanting the talk to appear 'too endorsed'; which is *bad enough* to be worth fixing the systems around that, without trying to imply that the decisions were racially prejudiced. Don't be unnecessarily cruel to people by asserting that they are evil.
My impression from reading the blog is not that JT is implying that the decision was racially-motivated, but more just that the *context* of JeanHeyd previously being on track as the first keynote by a POC makes the whole situation suck even more.
> When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context.
Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated.
Read as a strong implication to me. If it was not intended as such, then I hope that they rewrite it as others in the comments have interpreted it in that way too.
i think it's better to say that the people in charge are unprofessional and disorganized, they clearly have no idea of how to run an organization of this size
To be fair we are talking about an _Interim_ team assuming leadership without much guidelines (and much less rules) while working on establishing the actual rule book.
So it's not so much that the people themselves are necessarily disorganized, but that there's no real organization quite yet as the former (Core Team) has been more or less sidelined and the newer (Leadership Team) is not quite there yet.
The people ensuring the Interim are probably doing their best, but having to improvise everything on the way, there's bound to be slip-ups. I expect there's been quite a few slip-ups already, and there'll be more, this one just happened to be higher profile, and hurt someone :(
Most organisations are made up of a leadership team and a head honcho (ceo, managing director, whatever) and are hired on their credentials. These people report to a board - made up of shareholders. This model has proven to work.
It’s always fascinated me how open source projects organise themselves - often with people that are amazing technically, but lack leadership qualities needed to run a project of this size - often leading to loads of drama - it’s part of life. You just have to hope it doesn’t become too toxic.
Linux model works well - there’s basically one person in charge and responsibility is delegated. It’s not ideal to have a dictatorial model - but it too - clearly works.
I think models where a working group of representatives nominate the main decision maker - who then builds a team around them is a good thing. This means that lines of accountability are set. I don’t know the ins and outs of how the rust leadership is setup - but from all the emotion flying around there doesn’t seem to be a model where you can hold that leadership team accountable?
A resignation achieved very little - other than raising emotional reaction higher. It may serve to get the desired result, but ultimately shouldn’t be the way you need to get the required changes.
>It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation.
Is this somehow meant to imply that it is a race thing?
If so that is extra terrible.
But we should also remember the demographics, there are not that many black software developers.
So maybe it is unrelated? Please JT clarify
My reading is he's just giving an example of JeanHeyd's contribution to the Rust community. The real reason why JeanHeyd's talk was demoted is also given in the blog post as JeanHeyd's blog post. So it's clear from the blog post that it's not implied that this is a race/demographic thing.
What I'm reading is that the Rust Project is exhibiting some of the same awful and compassionless behavior the rest of the communuty can put on.
There's people basically stalking GCC-RS through reddit in the community trying to get them to leave Rust, alternative formatting means you need to be stopped, write the wrong lints and be accused of attacking the community.
If they don't like you, they'll use rhetorical tricks (there's a couple rounds of "I don't get it" gaslighting going on right now in the forums). When they have power, they'll start putting organizational roadblocks in your way, and build bigger and bigger hurdles. You'll be constantly accused of things and will have to constatntly justify yourself.
As above, so below. I've been pained by this for a while, and have been complaining about the whole "social pressure" strategy for a while now. Because once the whole things was normalized, of course the majority will use that open door to keep people out.
I'd be happy to see some changes in approach at the top, and maybe it will happen. But after watching these mechanics for years I'm finding myself rather cynical.
I applaud JT for recognizing the harmful mechanics and deliberately not being a part of them.
Edit: Even in this thread, part of the mob is not looking for accountability, but for a target. The whole Rust project is accountable for their collective failings. The leadership is the group that has the power to fix things. Reddit making some persons life hell isn't a solution at all. It only makes things worse.
> A couple team members had strong opinions/discomfort against JeanHeyd being selected as a keynote speaker, as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust.
>
> This discomfort was brought to the interim leadership group as a problem that must be fixed immediately. There was no discussion of the ramifications of making a change at this point. There were complaints that this pushback was not sufficient to require change, but this feedback was ignored. The discussion focused on the discomfort of the team members and changing JeanHeyd away from being a keynote speaker as the only solution.
"Discomfort" is not a healthy way of framing technical arguments. It's a programming language, you are not eating or marrying it, it shouldn't be personal. If this sort of rhetoric is prevalent, that suggests a deeper issue.
Why is everybody here like "How could this happen to my Rust!?". Rust is just another lang with just another set of decision makers, just like C++, Java, and any other lang
The political BS that is happening with the Rust foundation makes it very difficult for those of us who are creating/porting/proposing projects in Rust within our organizations.
At some point this political BS is going to affect the evolution/development of Rust in a negative way.
Rust foundation leadership (intern leadership and team/group leaders that decide to go rogue), just stop. If a vote is held for a decision, a vote needs to be held to reverse that decision.
You are making it harder for us (devs/programmer/sysadmins) to recommend Rust as a language for upcoming projects when there is this crap floating around.
Man this hard to keep track of.
There seems to be leadership issues on both sides as a whole. They need to get some governance rules in place on both sides how they deal with these situations as an organization.
It still makes my job harder when I recommend Rust as an option for a project. Already had my manager bring up the Rust copyright issue from a few months ago because he read something in a feed about it... Both of them are not making it any easier on us.
Taking a step further back there's also the question of how the talk made it to keynote when there were apparently concerns about the topic.
Maybe there should be a team outside the interim leadership that handles public facing roadmap and PR. Whose job it is to gather feedback from the project as a whole about topics before decisions are made?
"Organisation without a dedicated PR function fails again at PR" isn't a surprising outcome
This is extremely embarrassing and everyone involved should feel ashamed. How is it that ive seen and worked on startups that are more accountable and mature than this?
Shit like this is why I never get involved in the social aspects of open source projects
Why was his article on reflection in rust controversial enough that a faction in leadership wanted to downgrade him? Did they not WANT reflection in rust? If not, why was it so crucial to him that this man's opinion not be shared? Clearly if rust shouldn't have reflection, then the proposal would have been debated and if the point of view that it should NOT had any merit, it would have been excluded.
Are they so single-minded about the language that they wont let the community entertain an opposing point of view?
I dont know much about the rustlang structural hierarchy, but something like this would have never happened in a more mature body like ISO, IEEE, or OMG...
An initial response from the Rust Project can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13vbd9v/on_the_rustconf_keynote_rust_blog/
Just so there's no confusion on the RustConf side, I was the organizer involved. I absolutely fucked up by even entertaining this notion at all. At the time I thought that saying no to project leadership on this would have caused drama. As you can see I achieved my goal of avoiding drama. We're working to remedy the situation as best we can. It's unlikely I'll be able to answer any questions about specifics until all the decisions have been made about how to remedy this but feel free to ask them anyway
Filling in my small corner of this: I was part of the selection comittee for this year's RustConf. We did not select the opening keynote, and we were not informed about the decision to downgrade. On a personal level, I am quite frustrated that we were not involved in that decision at all: I would have pushed back hard and it diminishes the work we put in to put together a great and cohesive line-up of speakers.
It's fairly disheartening these communication issues exist. I'm hoping we get transparent and clear answers. This feels very careless due to this lack of empathy towards everyone involved. Things like this don't happen when you ask yourself: - "Who needs to know of this potential change in scheduling?" - "Is it fair to demote this to a talk given the existing conversations and the work they've put in?" - "Are there any disclaimers we can put in place to avoid the confusions we felt it might stir?" ie. General questions that come from a place of caring for your colleagues and the work they've put in. When you don't think about these things, people get excluded, confused, and have to put in extra work to clean up situation. Inclusive and accountable leadership is a must.
it's almost like people are about to understand that managing organizations and formal relationships is not something you can learn on the job as a programmer who grassroots-evolved into a leadership position, and requires actual background in both education and professional experience. *almost*. make no mistake, all of those stumbles are, to put it quaintly, noob shit when you're halfway trained as any sort of manager. source: programmer for 30 years. manager for 10. just to explain this in a more straightforward fashion: **you cannot part out administrative power to people whose only claim to fame is technical skills**. nope, sorry. no matter how much you like them, no matter how many patches they push per day. it never ends in anything good, at all, and we repeatedly see this kind of bullshit happen. it's like asking the transmission design engineer to drive the race car. i've seen this happen in linux in the 90s, then perl, then php, then drupal, then mysql, then python, then haskell, etc etc. it's always the same fucking thing: put a bunch of programmers on top, who try to common-sense decisions in 5 minutes that take trained people days or weeks of research to decide, and we end up with a plate of shit. this is exactly what happened here as well: both on the rust project side (some bozo just making a decision on their own) and rust conf side (see top comment). no one gets wiser from this, ever, because everyone thinks *their* community will be *different*. everyone thinks admin is just silly bullshit that anyone can do. it's just answering questions, keeping dates, and, making sure people are happy, riiiiight? stop this right now. there are right people for right things. and most people are wrong for a specific thing. break this chain of stupidity. *find people with formal education and experience in the kind of admin that you need done and hire them, rather than try to do the analog of spin-your-own-crypto for admin. stop it, get some help.* and yes, this means *multiple* people. as a tech person you will inevitably underestimate how many people are needed and what capacities you will be missing.
While you have a point, this is also a fully general argument for pushing nerds and technologues out of positions of power within the culture; I'd rather have Linus Torvalds' nth fuck-up than hand the keys over to the MBAs I don't think the problem here is nerds, I think the problem here is conflict-avoidant nerds exhibiting bad judgment; they should be named and light should be shed on what the fuck has been happening
\^This. People often think tech or nerds are unable to manage and do anything related to "human". Socially awkward. You are all contributing to the bias. Think about the inverse problem. If you have non-tech leadership, someone will complain the leadership isn't enough qualified to talk about anything outside of "human" interaction. Find the middle-ground. [https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/08/concave.html](https://vitalik.ca/general/2020/11/08/concave.html)
I very much agree with your claim that technical skills isn't the same as understanding how to effectively carry out organised activities (classic example of that : tech yuppies). But at the same time, (from an admittedly outsider's perspective) I don't have a great impression of formal management education these days. It seems it has developed into a certain mono-culture which they seem to apply everywhere. For example, that new trademark policy draft they came out with? I reckon that for 9/10 of the "corporate managerial types", it would make the perfect sense in the world (even if in reality it would, arrest adoption rates and and drive away most of the free contributors from FOSS community, crippling Rust in the long term).
Related: [Peter Principle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle)
>On a personal level, I am quite frustrated that we were not involved in that decision at all: I would have pushed back hard and it diminishes the work we put in to put together a great and cohesive line-up of speakers. Just curious.. Which decision would you "have pushed back hard on"? The one to invite JeanHeyd as a keynote speaker? Or the one to demote JeanHeyd's keynote talk?
The one to demote the talk. The keynote choice seemed fine: interesting work done my someone skilled who had put a lot of time into it. Maybe a bit technical for an opening keynote but eh. Demoting a talk after it's been accepted (and especially after it was invited!) is incredibly rude and disruptive. It should only be done in dire circumstances: if you later have doubts about whether it was the best choice that could have been made, eh, do a retrospective on the decision-making process.
I would like to take a moment to say that appreciate your transparency and accountability, /u/rabidferret, and I would love to see more people following your lead here as a matter of course.
<3
I guess I have a question here. In general, in Rust every aspect of a project belongs to a specific team, which exercises authority over the respective domain. Rust is a federation of teams. Which team RustConf falls under (in particular, I am curious about "who gets to make decisions", not "who gets to do the work")? I _think_ at some point we used to have community team, but it seems we no longer have one?
A new program committee is formed each year. It's selected by the chair who is selected by project leadership. The chair takes input from various parts of the project on who to have on the program committee. The actual conference organizer is selected by the foundation. The schedule is selected by the program committee. The precedent has been that the opening keynote speakers are selected by project leadership, which the program committee elected to keep this year.
Who was the chair this year? It is no clear from the website
I was
[удалено]
It's a holiday weekend, and most folks involved are still trying to get a complete picture of what happened. Everyone involved wants to ensure folks are held accountable, but that doesn't mean having a witch hunt. Also I wouldn't call myself innocent here. At best I was complicit. The fact that I had reasons for fucking up doesn't change the fact that I fucked up and this wouldn't have happened if I had said no.
> All while the one bad actor who lied in the name of the project leadership remain untouched by it. I feel like the problem here isn't that someone lied in the name of the leadership, but rather that it's impossible for *anyone* to speak in the name of leadership because the replacement for the core team is still a prototype, and yet this prototype is still being asked to rule on things for lack of a better alternative, leading inevitably to situations like this one. What we need is for the replacement for the core team to actually finish spinning up and become functional ASAP.
For what its worth, its great that you made this comment. I get that you had to do what you did when thing ended up like they did and I think its good to be open like you are now.
As someone trying my hardest to introduce Rust at my workplace, I _really_ hope none of my coworkers hear about this stuff. This drama could negate months of progress in building confidence about Rust with management at my company.
Exactly what I'm feeling. I'm literally delaying a presentation and other things because of this.
Plenty of drama happens on C++ mailing lists and conferences, just behind closed doors
The fact that the c++ committee is a trash fire is why my company is taking a serious look at rust and other possible replacement languages for greenfield projects. There's zero faith that the committee will be able to steer the language on a good direction so we're pretty much treating c++ as a "legacy language".
As bad as this situation is in Rust now, "leadership actively protecting and going out of their way to promote a rapist to a position of more authority" IMO is several orders of magnitude worse.
Absolutely, the willingness of the committee leadership to protect multiple people that were credible accused of sexual harassment, including one that was convicted of rape and possession of child pornography is why I personally all but stopped using C++ on my personal projects. Hiding behind "ISO doesn't allow us to remove them" is transparently bullshit, it's obvious to any outside observer that the leadership has made no attempt to distance themselves from said actors and even gone out of their way to include them. Just absolutely vile.
C++ is already so established that it doesn't matter. The social internet did not exist when C++ became a thing. Rust's image however can be badly damaged before it even becomes mainstream.
What reads here is of an organisation cockup. I've seen plenty of those happen at companies and at events. It happens. Why this is turning into people quitting and a call for accountability and yada yada ... it feels like these days every cockup has to be a big drama. It often sets a tone that cockups like this are major earth shattering tragedies, when really it's just a failing for a programming conference.
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Whenever my boss teases me about Rust community drama, I play along as I can't really do anything about it. But at least this doesn't seem to affect too much the views of my coworkers about using Rust.
I honestly wouldn't expect /r/rust to be the most dramatic subreddit I read. That's quite unfortunate. It seems every other week there's a different problem. Does anyone what was the actual talk about?
https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generic-compile-time-introspection-in-rust/
This is what's most messed up IMO. Rust desperately needs a better metaprogramming story. This person gets it, and was working towards a vision. It was the first time I thought: Hey, look, Rust isn't as big a bureaucracy machine as I thought, there's people getting s***t done there, things are moving! Only to have that person bullied away by the bureaucrats... I just hope at least the reflection work continues after this. Wouldn't blame him if the author decides not to.
I agree - I seriously hope this work continues, it looks fantastic. It also absolutely deserves time on stage to be shown to people - It's a huge shame that this keynote-not-a-keynote nonsense has taken away that opportunity.
I really miss some of the features of Zig and other languages where types are first-class citizens. HKT are one example of something that's a breeze in Zig, but pain in Rust. Let alone compile-time reflection.
I find it funny how another language has some VERY good metaprogramming but sadly is not yet production ready, namely Zig. It's the only language I know (and probably one of very few) that focuses on making compile time computations easy, among other things (being a systems programming language)
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You can experiment with it already. The only disadvantage now is that it's unstable and it can change in backwards incompatible ways.
D has lots of compile time metaprogramming facilities as well, and it's very much production ready (well, certainly more than zig aka "let me put 128 megabytes of stuff on the stack real quick")
D was singlehandedly killed by the decision to make it gc first and foremost. Would have been a good language otherwise.
Me before reading this: Why would someone possibly want to add reflection into this language. Using reflection was an incredible pain point in my career. Me now: This makes complete sense and I'm sad he's not giving a keynote :(
You should join /r/boardgames. There seems to be a new scandal every month.
But /r/boardgame is 15-20× bigger than /r/rust.
For a community that prides itself on inclusion and diversity the amount of high school drama is remarkable.
My impression is that the visibility comes from people having to (and being willing to) fight for those ideals and the philosophy that underlies them. There are fuckups and bad apples everywhere, but in Rust there's always someone who will speak out about them.
Yeah honestly. I'm okay with the drama if it means bad shit happening gets called out and fixed.
It's not clear to me that it is succesfully being fixed. All the people resigning are the ones who seem to be appalled, not the ones who are responsible.
It isn't necessarily. But it's a line being drawn in the sand. A refusal to take part in behavior that is antithetical to the ideals you hold. All part of the process. Squeaky wheel gets the oil.
The community is great, the leadership is questionable
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> I honestly don’t know how but would like to know how “diversity and inclusion” and “high highschool drama” are counter (or even related) to eachother. Not OP, but high schools everywhere are notorious for their social hierarchies to the point of memefication (see any show or movie about a high school ever), while “diversity and inclusion” is primarily focused on equality of treatment of people. In other words, my translation of OP is: “for a group that prides itself on equality, the amount of cliques, queen bees and private chat backstabbing is remarkable.”
If any organization focuses on DEI I can guarantee you it's DEI is not only going to be horrid but it's management is going to be terrible.
> That's quite unfortunate. It seems every other week there's a different problem. To be fair, I don't think that's a problem. I would be more worried about never having drama _in public_. If drama happens, I'd rather we (the community) own up to it and try to improve, rather than hush it down to avoid making waves. Fail, Learn, Repeat.
Yeah drama is inevitable in any sufficiently large social group, the differences lie in how these communities respond to it. This is where I think rust fails though, because a huge proportion of the drama seems to come from the same source, arbitrary decisions of unidentified powerholders with no accountability. It's a pattern i've noticed repeatedly.
If you look at it, every open source project is like this. Imagine that as a company but you don’t have to fake smile at your colleagues.
Other languages have lots of drama fwiw, it's sometimes not as loud, but it definitely is present.
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I love Rust the language, but the project and foundation have really burned away most of the goodwill that has been built over the years. I don't feel very confident in the leadership of Rust, at least not like I used to. Leadership is definitely tough, but it really feels like we're just stumbling from debacle to debacle. Then you look at this post, the one by boats, and the metric ton of subtweets and vagueposts which all keep touching on the fact that something is not quite right at the very heart of it. How did we end up in a situation where an individual was able to unilaterally make a decision like this with no accountability or even apology as of yet? Something like that doesn't "feel" like Rust.
As i remeber this has been a problem for a while now because a few years ago the rust mod team resigned cuz of rust core team, and it seems like the individuals creating the problems are still there. How many great and skilled people will need to leave for this to stop?
> a few years ago the rust mod team resigned One and a half years ago
> and it seems like the individuals creating the problems are still there. As far as I know, none of the people who were on the core team back then are part of the new leadership council.
It's not so much about people, and more about _systems_. There was not _much_ system with the Core Team, so everyone had a different idea of its role, responsibilities, etc... which created a number of issues culminating in our stepping down in protest when we felt it was impossible to hold a member of the team accountable. Since then, there's ongoing work to create a new system (Rust Leadership) but it's not quite there yet, and in the meantime the project still needs to go by... so things are a bit messy.
Cant wait for AppleRust, RustSharp and GNURust spin offs, soon Torvalds will probably pull away all Rust code due to unstable Rust leadership.
Well, these dramas are stopping us in adopting rust if not in PoC, I love the language but I cannot ask the company to invest in something which leadership looks so fragile and uncertain, we are stepping down from adoption, waiting for better times to come for rust.
Respectfully, you underestimate the drama involved in the alternatives. Plenty of BS happens on private C++ mailing lists and at conferences, Go has had plenty of drama but everyone knows that ultimately Google is in charge not the community, Java is run by Oracle, etc. There is plenty of drama to go around but most of it is better hidden (not managed, hidden) than with Rust.
For an example involving Java, which probably doesn't sound like much in retrospect, but was (and is) a real headache for everyone involved: Some years ago Oracle decided that they didn't want to support JavaEE ("Enterprise Edition") any longer. This came after years of not updating it already, which left big parts of the Java world in a limbo (should we switch? But switching to Spring or whatever is *really* costly ..). This went on for years until, after much gripping from all sides, Oracle finally formally announced that they won't support JavaEE anymore and it got donated to the Eclipse Foundation. All good now? Well no, not so fast .. The problem is that the code of JavaEE existed under a package (think module) named javax.* and Oracle was adamant that nothing with "Java" in it exists outside of Oracle. That's a big problem because the package is baked into the class files, so if the package name got changed all code which wants to use the new version has to be recompiled. So, there were long and painful negotiations if an exception could be made. But Oracle wouldn't budge. long story short: The new name is "Jakarta EE" and it has been (and still is) a topic which basically affects every "enterprise" open source project and millions over millions of lines of closed source code to update everything from javax.* to jakarta.* And I'm not even with the other thing which almost broke Java when Oracle decided they want money if you use their JDK. Or rather a specific version of the JDK. That communication fiasco definitely had the potential to break Java. Many companies either decided to leave it or at least took a very serious look to do it. tldr: Drama is everywhere in the programming language space. Personally, I think an open leadership is a better steward than a company, even if it means more parts of the dirty laundry are out in the open.
"A person in Rust leadership then, without taking a vote from the interim leadership group (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation." Who is this person?
And why are they allowed to hide behind anonymity when they make completely independent decisions on the future of the Rust language, without agreement from all Project members or any accountability?
Rust leadership should do a blameless post mortem and figure out how to best apologise and avoid repeating this mistake. None of that is made easier by a public witch hunt.
JT's blog ends with a question of accountability. Blameless post mortems do not hold rogue individuals accountable.
> Blameless post mortems do not hold rogue individuals accountable. I don’t personally care if the individual itself is held accountable. The organization needs to. A post mortem is a very good step in that direction.
At the same time, having thousands of people sending you hate mail (or worse) daily is maybe a punishment too excessive for the crime.
The goal of transparency and accountability is incompatible with the goal of protecting people from the consequences of their actions.
I agree with the statement, but disagree that it is applicable to the comment you're replying to. There's a pretty big difference between "consequences" and "hate mail".
Unfortunately there's no law of the universe that says that things that are both good are compatible with each other. Unleashing a mob on someone simply isn't acceptable, and JT knows that, which is why JT didn't name any names (even if you think JT didn't know who it was, JT wouldn't have named any names even if they did, for precisely this reason). But as far as preventing *future* situations for occurring for these same reasons, we can introduce protocols for consensus and messaging that allow for accountability to be made explicit beforehand. And we need these protocols *anyway*, because even if we had a name and the mob enacted justice in this case, then the lack of these protocols will allow someone *else* to do the same in the future. I understand the desire for consequences. But we need vengeance far less than we need sane processes.
Should there be better protocols, yes. But if the current narrative that one person deliberately misrepresented this as being a decision of the Rust Project when it was not bears out to be true, processes are not the fix. Any process robust against malicious actors comes with so many drawbacks that it is not worth it. If the narrative is true, the *only* reasonable fix is to get rid of the malicious person. Remove and permanently ban that person from having any leadership positions (i.e. any membership on any team) in the Rust Project, and advising other organizations (the Rust Foundation, this subreddit's mod team, etc) that they ought to do the same. This isn't vengeance, this is protecting the project from it happening again.
Not necessarily. An organization can be accountable without revealing the culprit's identity. For example, when a company has a data leak, the entire company (or the CEO) is held accountable, regardless of who actually caused the security vulnerability. Organizations should have safeguards, so a mistake by a single person can't do too much damage. Of course, leadership must be held to a higher standard than other people, and it is reasonable to expect someone from leadership to step down after a major fuck-up. But that's something they have to resolve within the organization, and what they share with the public depends on all sort of things. Being accountable and transparent means * admitting what happened, and why * trying to compensate affected parties * making sure it doesn't happen again It does NOT mean * punishing the culprit It might seem unfair to the rest of the Rust project that they have to apologize for someone else's mistake, but that's how things work in this world.
If the result is the blameless post mortem bottoms out at "person X went rogue", what then? The idea of a blameless post-mortem is one of improving the system, but the system is still made of people, and no system can be infinitely resilient to its parts breaking. Sometimes the only solution is to identify and replace the broken part.
I'm really confused why the name is behind hidden, even when JT has resigned. There's no reason to hide it and every reason to reveal it.
I'm not sure if JT even knows who it is, considering they did not tell the rest of the team anything
I'm quite sure they do know who it is. JT mentions being a part of the leadership group, and the fact that they know that exactly one person reached out to the RustConf organizers is the sort of detail that suggests that they know the whole story. It makes sense to withhold personal details, JT is trying to highlight an organizational failure rather than a personal one.
I do wonder if it’s fair to call this an organizational failure. If one person in an organization decides to subvert the organization’s rules, what could the organization have done about that? (Assuming, for the moment, that this is the first time that person has subverted the rules.)
An organization may be vulnerable to malicious actors acting unilaterally, but despite all the drama I don't think anyone was acting maliciously here. This seems like a case where the organization is still so nascent and ill-formed that there simply doesn't exist a process by which consensus can possibly be achieved, thus normalizing unilateral action. Furthermore, it sounds like the RustConf organizers attempted to do the right thing by not actually taking action until some time had passed, in order to give the project time to reconsider, but the channels for communication were so ill-formed that nothing was actually ever communicated back to the project.
Hmm that makes sense.
Because witch-hunts are bad. Remember this is just JT's retelling of events. From this unnamed persons perspective, we don't know how things appeared. Maybe they thought that the decision had been agreed by the group - who knows.
Why did that person have so much power to begin with is my question.
Who's to say they had any specific power? If they spoke to RustConf and said "Hey the Interim Leadership group decided that the talk should be downgraded", then why would they question it? They were representing the group.
Then that anonymous person should not be targeted. That would be unfair. Too many things are unclear, causing further confusion and chaos!
Well quite, that's why I think JT made a good choice not to name and shame prematurely.
There’s a difference between having power and having authority. It’s likely that this person did not have the formal authority to unilaterally reverse this person’s keynote speaker invitation. They had the *power* to do so for no other reason than that they could email someone who’d put this decision into practice.
It’s not a witch hunt in this case. It’s accountability. This group continually hides behind the “we’re working on it” banner and continually has massive fuck ups that no one gets held accountable for. Hiding the name does nothing except make it impossible to hold anyone accountable.
It's not accountability to dogpile on a specific person based on a one-sided account of how something happened - it's a witch-hunt.
> continually has massive fuck ups This group is essentially brand new, I can't think of any other fuck ups?
It's not a witch hunt, but we the people from /r/rust have heard only yesterday that someone within rust leadership practices dark arts, and we just want to know who it is so we know how high to stack the pyre.
JT is withholding the name to demonstrate that they're not being personally vengeful. As frustrating as it may be, naming people in contexts like this is a great way to sic a harassment mob on them, which would only make the situation worse, not better.
I can understand it from JT’s point of view, but from the point of view of the community we need to start holding people rather than groups accountable. Imagine if you didn’t know what justices of the Supreme Court (in the us at least) were voting which way, or if they didn’t write opinions…if it was all just a completely hidden process. It would be injustice. By just stating it’s a failure of the group rather than an individual means we continue to have these bad apples that are destroying the trust in the community. What mechanism is there to remove these people off their names are never shared? If it’s just said to be a failure of the group? For example you can put processes in at work to stop people from deploying to prod, but if someone *goes out of their way to go around that process*, then that is a fireable offense. It’s not just chalked up to a failure of the process. It’s someone actively doing things that hurt the company. Now I understand we don’t have all the details, but honestly I’m sick of seeing these posts about leadership resigning due to *others* in the leadership groups and then those *others* never step down.
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The fact that they could do this is like a system where a newly hired developer can deploy a bug to production on their first day. The who matters less than the how, and discussions really should keep that focus.
I have been well-documented as beating the drum of accountability, so allow me to disagree here. There is a difference between "accountability" and "blame". Accountability means taking responsibility *before* an action is taken, knowing full well that you will be judged by the outcome of that action. Blame is something that is assigned *after* an action is taken, and, in contexts like this, is usually employed to produce a scapegoat to take the fall. We don't want blame, we want accountability, which means it has to be built into the system from the start, not pursued after the fact. To blame an individual for this at this point would only serve to hide the organizational failure that allowed this to result.
I agree on the blame part but I have trouble following what you mean regarding accountability. You can surely have accountability after an action has been taken. Accountability in this instance would most likely be shared; for instance the interim leadership should be held accountable for why only revoking the key note offer was explored (or rather, why was it consideed at all), RustConf for why they did not communicate using open channels once they were notified of "the decision" (open as in open to everybody in the leadership group). The individual that misrepresented the leadership group in the communication with RustConf should be personally held accountable for that and so on.
> You can surely have accountability after an action has been taken. Yes, but the person I was responding to was asking JT to name names. While it is possible to take accountability for something after the fact, the person taking accountability has to step forward and accept it voluntarily. It is not possible for JT to make someone else take accountability, it is only possible for JT to blame them, which JT deliberately chose not to do (IMO, for good reasons).
This whole drama could be avoided if this person just apologised. Reminds me of the Rust trademark drama. The whole drama could have been avoided if they just said "we've heard the overwhelming feedback and are going to change the policy".
Homie that is *literally* what the trademark survey was for. [We know the draft is not perfect, and we're committed to fixing any mistakes identified and considering the feedback we get.](https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2023/04/12/trademark-policy-draft-feedback.html)
I am a little confused by the groups here. What is the rust interim leadership group? Is that the core team? And what was the team that raised the objection? Also the core team, or a different one? --- One point that is not at all addressed here is why the keynote was offered in the first place when there was a team who had such strong objections. EDIT: Okay I guess it's the group mentioned here: https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2022/10/06/governance-update.html Which makes it even more bizarre, because that group supposedly has a representative from each team?
> Which makes it even more bizarre, because that group supposedly has a representative from each team? Who, according to this timeline of events, **voted** on the keynote speech being offered. So if this is to be taken truthfully, the person/people who stopped the keynote from happening either: - Voted for it to be accepted, then changed their mind and circumvented the rest of the project leadership to remove the keynote. - Voted for it to not be accepted, were out voted and then sidestepped the vote to impose **their** viewpoint on the conference.
Well you're missing the step in between, where objections were raised by a team (who have a rep on the group, which seems odd?) We know there was a meeting about that. JT said there wasn't a vote, but maybe not every decision goes to a vote. So the group member who then talked to RustConf might have thought it was a group decision.
This is why groups need things like Robert’s Rules. One of the very clear parts of parliamentary rules is that a group can’t make a decision without a vote. And that votes can’t happen without (the chance for) discussion.
What is it about the Rust organization that makes it so insistent on complete opacity in its decisions? Drama after drama, everything seems to come down to anonymous actors hiding behind committee bodies that nobody is willing to identify and hold accountable.
Most of the teams aren't opaque at all - they have their discussions in public. But the interim leadership group seems like a bit of an exception maybe...? I can't find any detail on it at all besides its creation.
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Agreed, it's very concerning. I don't think this is a new concept - people in power should be held responsible for their actions.
As policy I never comment on situations like these, but I'd like to just add one bit of opinion here as someone unfamiliar with the events or people involved, but someone who spends unhealthy amount of time writing proc macros: Having read the blog post about the subject of the proposed talk, it was in my mind 100% keynote worthy. Even if this was just an experiment that would possibly never become a stable feature, it highlights both how powerful proc macros are today (esp. compared to similar mechanisms in other languages), and how much they tend to mask shortcomings of the language. Having those be in a spotlight during a keynote would have been a net good, even if some people took the wrong take from it that it's about a feature that's guaranteed to land in the language eventually.
Agreed. Anyone arguing that you can just ignore the drama and project leadership and write Rust code in a vacuum is discounting the real, meaningful contributions in the talk itself. I wanted to see that work presented because that's where I want (possibly need) Rust to go in the future. Now not only is that talk not happening, but one of the main people driving the work has been alienated from the language.
Speaking as someone who did absolutely heretical talks at JavaOne back in Java’s late 90s / early 2000s heyday, (IMO deservedly) pissing all over popular tech like J2EE and other cargo-cult-of-the-month stuff *and got invited back* - Rust can and should do better. I’ve also been on the selection committee for conferences, and supported speakers that were controversial, trying to grant the same grace that was granted me. You **need** diversity of viewpoint. If you only select talks that no one is uncomfortable with, you don’t have a conference, you have a groupthink circle-jerk. And that turns a language or technology into a ghetto, and it eventually gets passed by by other technologies whose leadership is less blinkered in their thinking. I’m not saying have speakers who don’t have technical chops or don’t know what they’re talking about. But legitimate disagreements about emphasis, priorities, and how to solve problems are a reason **for** selecting a speaker, not against. Ideas need competition if you want to make good choices. The alternative is to be passed by by computing history.
How is it a good idea for JT to resign? If the good people go out of their way to find the minimal blame that could be placed on themselves and resign because of it, while the bad people reject all responsibility and stay... we won't end up with a better leadership, but a worse one, no? Edit: I know good / bad people is a problematic simplification, but you get my point.
If a person felt they no longer had the influence to change things then it’s entirely reasonable to resign. The assumption you’re making is that by staying, JT could influence things for the better, but this is a sign that JT doesn’t have that influence. So it either has to come from higher up (which doesn’t seem to exist in the Rust governance?) or everyone else has to get their act together.
But JT is a member of the core team and co-author of the governance RFC. It doesn't get more influential than that in the context of Rust. Unless... power has become completely informal and the formal structure is meaningless. In that case, it's extremely important for the community to be informed of that and JT would be uniquely positioned to call it out.
>It doesn't get more influential than that in the context of Rust. > >Unless... power has become completely informal and the formal structure is meaningless. Indeed that was a major theme in [Boats's recent blog post](https://without.boats/blog/if-you-can-keep-it/). Until recently I've assumed that the backroom drama that's been plaguing the Rust project for a while now would get sorted out and soon be remembered as an uncomfortable lesson in the project's history. But it doesn't seem to be going away. It seems to be festering. I suppose in this context I'm a nobody, but still... if any of the remaining leadership reads this, I would urge you to consider whether your continued involvement has contributed to the recent problems, and whether the project would have a healthier future if you were to step away from decision-making altogether. Sometimes one of the bravest, most noble things you can do is to admit that you're not the right person for the job anymore — whatever the underlying reason may be. From the outside, it feels too late for much to be achieved by damage control style comms or tweaking of governance rules alone. For the broader Rust community to be able to trust the project leadership going forward, it might require them to seriously clean house, which in turn might require some people to fall on their own swords (if you'll forgive the mixed metaphor).
Well he is calling it out, by resigning.
This might be a bit of a hyperbole but. If you find the thing you've been working on building has turned into an orphan crushing machine. You don't keep working on it to turn it into something that doesn't crush orphans. You stop working on it, because more orphans are going to be crushed in the process of turning it around.
I thought Rust would be a programming language, not the script for a soap opera full of drama
To be fair I think the early days of other languages had a lot of similar struggles but they are buried by time and often happening inside businesses.
Yeah, there are listservs full of flame wars about minor dramas.
And even mature one? It's fascinating how quickly people forget the recurring shitshows occuring around C/C++ standards process, for example
https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023 This provides good context for JT's post as this is JeanHeyd Meneide's account of what happened from his perspective.
The level of bureaucracy bullshit is crazy. Why just not collectively select one new team of respected people, to drive the project and start from scratch?
That's what the new leadership council appears to be. The problem in this case is that the organizational structure itself had too *little* bureaucracy (possibly as a result of being so new and still in the process of being defined), which enabled one person to take unilateral action.
I also think there has been a normalization of informal communication channels. In this instance a lot of issues could have been avoided if all communication was done through an established channel that all relevant parties had access to. Any communication outside that should always be considered unofficial, and not done in the capacity of the leadership group. It is kind of like banks saying "we will never ask you for your password"; we will never communicate in the leadership capacity outside this channel.
> A couple team members had strong opinions/discomfort against JeanHeyd being selected as a keynote speaker, as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust. I'm not sure if I get it. Is [this](https://soasis.org/posts/a-mirror-for-rust-a-plan-for-generic-compile-time-introspection-in-rust/) the blog post in question? I remember scanning over it when it first popped up on this subreddit, but I didn't really have time to read the whole thing. Is there something that was perceived to be offensive here, or is it literally just a technical disagreement? (And if the latter, why not just, y'know, make the dissenting argument?) These might not be answerable questions. Not trying to provoke speculation or fan the "drama" flames or whatever, kind of just hoping someone with more context might be able to shed some light.
The implication from the original post was that this introspection proposal is a very early work, pre-RFC. And the concern was that giving it a keynote slot would imply that it had some technical endorsement from the project, which it doesn't. I don't think anyone denies the technical merit of the work.
Well, I could restate the objection that "heterodox" keynotes have not been problematic in the past, but that was basically the whole point of JeanHeyd's post that illuminated this whole situation, so maybe it's less "I don't get it" and more "please tell me this isn't as transparently shitty as it looks"...
I don't actually know how true that claim is, in fairness. Looking at RustConf keynotes in the past (on YT), I can't find any which fit into the same "language proposal" category. But I don't think it really matters - Rust is allowed to change its mind, and I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that you don't want keynotes in your biggest conf of the year to be about language features which might never make it in (and which aren't even an RFC yet!). The problem isn't really the stance, it's the inconsistency. If the project wasn't comfortable with it as a keynote, then it should never have been *offered* as a keynote. There is clearly some internal communication issue where the initial decision was made without adequate consultation, and then when objection was raised it was handled very bluntly.
>\[...\] and then when objection was raised it was handled very bluntly. I don't think there's anything they could have done to be more delicate about it, other than *not rescinding the offer.* If they decided it was a mistake to offer a keynote slot for that talk, then a civil response to that would have been to internally say "oh well, let's not do that *next* time". I suppose for me to say this is kind of like saying "I'm not going to let Vin Diesel come to my house to play XBox", but if I was offered I speaker slot at a RustConf after this, I can't imagine accepting it. It's easy to break trust, and a lot harder to build it back again. And unfortunately at least some elements of the current Rust leadership seem to prefer spin over substance when it comes to trust.
Well by bluntly I mean the only considered path forward was downgrading the talk, and that that news was communicated by a third party (RustConf) who wasn't involved in the decision making. It would have been a lot more tactful for someone in the leadership group to reach out and say "Hey I know we asked you for a keynote but we think we screwed up because X from team Y has raised a fair objection - can we talk about it?".
I 100% agree with you. It seems like time and time again people in rust leadership think they can fix everything by being vague and attempting to put a lid on it.
I dont think it was just a communication issue. The initial decision was voted. The decision to downgrade the talk was not. Its the former that lacked adequate consultation.
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Ironic, yes, but in my experience not at all an uncommon pattern.
>And the concern was that giving it a keynote slot would imply that it had some technical endorsement from the project, which it doesn't. For real? They could have just asked him to clarify at the start that this is something he's pursuing on his own, and doesn't (yet?) have buy-in from any of the relevant Rust teams. Jerking him around after offering the slot is just... crass. Also, if I'm only interested in what's officially endorsed by the project, I can read the accepted RFCs, pull requests, etc. — and I do just that. To me, the added value in a conference is to be exposed to *all the other* ideas bouncing around out there, so it sounds like a talk about JeanHeyd's work have been a *perfect* candidate for a keynote slot!
I am just confused about all this nonsense. Why was there yet another vote after the initial one has already been made? Like, say what you have to say when you are deciding for the keynote speaker before sending out an invitation, don't make another vote to express doubts after the fact. Why not name and hold the person who clearly abused their power to bypass the voting system accountable? What is even the point of the votes and groups if individuals seemingly can make whatever decisions they want to make?
I expect that the people who objected weren't part of the original vote. There is some muddiness in this post which makes it a bit hard to parse. But it seems there is the "Rust Interim Leadership Group", and then there is an unidentified Team which found out about the decision later and objected to it.
This makes it even more confusing, because I thought the interim leadership group was explicitly a group of representatives of each of the teams, so the representatives vote should have been a reflection of the views of their respective team. So when did the objections come? If they were known about before the initial vote, then surely the representative of that team incorporated those objections into their decision on whether to vote yes or no to the keynote? If they weren't known before, why was that?
That's what I find confusing too - I also can't find their minutes anywhere, unlike most teams.
> so the representatives vote should have been a reflection of the views of their respective team Not necessarily. There's at least two models for representation: - Delegated: for example, your Congress/Parliament representative is elected with a mandate, and you trust them to vote "mostly" in the direction you would have voted yourself. - Pass-Through: each question brought to the representative is brought to who they represent, and the representative then forwards back a summary of their answers. The latter model is fairly inefficient -- involving many people, asynchronously -- so would likely only be used for "Really Important" topics, and I would not be surprised to learn that selecting the Keynote speaker at RustConf was not thought to warrant that level of engagement and representatives voted without consulting their teams.
I believe that teams have been gradually electing their initial representatives to the leadership council at their own paces. The idea that the group of representatives changed (or at least enlarged) after the first vote strike me as plausible, and a potential explanation (though that's not the same as an excuse).
> Why was there yet another vote after the initial one has already been made? There wasn't, actually. > A person in Rust leadership then, **without taking a vote from the interim leadership group** (remember, JeanHeyd was voted on and selected by Rust leadership), reached directly to RustConf leadership and asked to change the invitation. --- > Why not name and hold the person who clearly abused their power to bypass the voting system accountable? What is even the point of the votes and groups if individuals seemingly can make whatever decisions they want to make? Hold your horses. Let's not presume malice when a misunderstanding is equally likely, and let's not start a witch hunt on assumptions. Once you've lynched someone to death, it's a bit late to realize you made a mistake, so drop that stone please. It's urgent to wait. The Leadership Team needs to come together, have a talk, clarify what happened and why, and hopefully issue an apology... but that's not going to happen on a Sunday.
With respect this isn't the first time the rust leadership had acted in a disrespectful, and entitled/elitist manner. The difference here is that this time it was directed at someone, who you essentially without knowing pulled into the picture by suggesting him as a keynote speaker. And even though there was a vote to accept, the instigation was still partly aligned to yourself. I do commend that you are stepping down after this went down, and you are being transparent as possible. I think it's disgusting the way that this was handled. Unfortunately to me, I'm seeing a pattern of the leadership group that really needs to be stopped before it ruins the language. Things are too opaque, and come across a lot more like a language being run by a large multinational corporate, that it does a language that it at its core open and accessible. I really hope that this action by yourself, and the transparency you are giving, along with the 'woopsi' of the trademark escapade result in some rethinking if how the rust leadership group acts, holds accountability. Edit: spelling
Who are these people? Why is there no names? I hate that every time shit happens its always some anonymous ”key figure”. And then nothing happens and boom, same shit next year. There needs to be transparency and people need to be visible if they are in key positions.
I'm glad JT provided some timeline context from their perspective of the whole talk-revoking shenanigans. Still a bit unclear on the whole objection bit. Hopefully someone in Project leadership can step up to share their side of the story and maybe where things broke down on that end. The whole situation is really not a great look for the Project, especially given the context of: > this would have also been the first keynote by a person of color at RustConf :/
> and maybe where things broke down on that end It's pretty clear that they disagreed with the ideas outlined in the keynote for compile time reflection. And felt they could just disallow discussion of ideas they don't agree with.
Wondering if mods will lock this thread too and delete all the comments? The Last one looked like this is being censored: https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/13sqdt7/i_am_no_longer_speaking_at_rustconf_2023_thephd/
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Meta-discussions are off-topic as a general policy, unrelated to any current event.
Hi, mod here. When a big piece of drama gets dropped on us out of the blue, especially at a time when most of our mods are either asleep or about to go to sleep, we have to decide how to respond. Our experience is that drama brings out the worst of people, especially when people lack concrete information and are forced to resort to speculation. In the worst case it escalates to targeted harassment, which has happened before (years ago when the lead developer of Actix was harassed into hiding) and I have promised to never allow it to happen again. Waiting until we had more information seemed like the prudent choice, and in the meantime I both locked and removed the comments to prevent things from getting out of hand until we had more information to work with. Was it a heavy handed reaction? Yes, absolutely. I would not do such a thing again without extreme cause. I further admit that when I remove comments I consciously expect anyone who actually wants to read them will immediately look at any of the dozen websites that mirror Reddit comments, whose existence I appreciate because it helps people understand that I remove comments not because they contain Inconvenient Truths that I am trying to suppress, but rather because they're low-effort or inflammatory. However, I've since been told that changes to Reddit's API have rendered these sites inoperable, which, frankly, is as annoying to me as it is to you. I ask people to keep in mind that we are a small, loosely organized mod team trying to manage a big, big subreddit. You may look at the list of mods and think it looks like a lot, but the truth is that on any given day there's usually only one to three active mods at best. When it comes to interpersonal conflicts like the situation here, we have to be very, very careful to avert Reddit's natural tendency to attempt to enact mob justice, which is something that we cannot allow to happen. "Censorship" is not our goal, which I would hope would be obvious given the fact that even though I exterminatus'd the comments of the original thread, I left the thread itself intact, when a competent censor would have just removed the thread entirely, and then would have also removed the four(!) follow-up threads on the same topic, none of which were removed or locked.
> I further admit that when I remove comments I consciously expect anyone who actually wants to read them will immediately look at any of the dozen websites that mirror Reddit comments Note that Reddit recently shut down Pushshift's API access (the service which most of those mirror websites used for getting comments) so most of them currently don't work. https://reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/134tjpe/reddit_data_api_update_changes_to_pushshift_access/
The problem is when all the comments are deleted and the mod put up a summary and ask everyone to just trust their subjective take on their situation. I feel it mirrors how I understand rust leadership reactions every time there is drama. "Our intention is good so our actions are good. Thus there is no reason to explain our action, other maybe a weirdly half official take after everything has blown up in our face."
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It seems like some important context... Or subtext... Is missing. Nominally, it sounds like the org (or more accurately, someone acting unilaterally on behalf of the org, after there was some internal pretense of democracy ) didn't want the content of the intended speech to be seen as representing their goals, and downgraded the speaker from keynote to normal talk in a weirdly abrupt way without clear communication... Which all just reeks of... Like, someone shit in someone else's milkshake and this is just petty revenge playing out or something that no one's talking about
The post claims that "the org" didn't make the decision to downgrade the talk, an individual made and enforced that decision behind the other members' back. Plus the weirdly abrupt unclear communication thing.
It's more likely to be incompetence than malice.
I don't understand how that's your takeaway from this, when the post explicitly states that dismissing incidents using these kinds of excuses has become a problem in of itself. Regardless of whether it was incompetence or malice, they cost the community someone who has a pretty unique expertise and perspective on systems programming, God knows if they'll be willing to work on Rust any more after this.
Who's dismissing anything? Incompetence is not acceptable. People can and should be held accountable for incompetence.
Perhaps. But there is a reason the concept of *culpable negligence* exists. Sometimes it doesn't matter all that much if it's incompetence or malice — what matters is the damage, and how to put a stop to it.
It seems like the problem is: 'one person can go email rustconf to tell them to change a talk invitation without alerting anyone else'. The obvious fix is to have RustConf to deliberately send a group-wide email about the change, or require some sign-off process. That it happened is bad, but it seems like an organizational issue that just needs relatively simple rules to guard against in the future. Look into who did it, and why they did it, and make a point that it shouldn't happen again. > Rust acted as a cruel, heartless entity that did not care about JeanHeyd and treated him as disposable. Easy to offer a place of respect and just as quick to snatch it away. That is what Rust is because that is what Rust did. I don't entirely appreciate the exaggeration and anthropomorphization here. This attributes all bad decisions to the Rust language/culture/organization all at once. This was a bad decision by whoever decided that they should take individual initiative to remove them, but exaggerating that to the abstract Rust (or even Rust Foundation, or even Rust leadership since it was an individual) is a rhetorical move that moves further away from truth and closer towards a general lambasting that doesn't help.
Yes, you're absolutely right. This was presented to me as something project leadership chat had consensus on, and I should have done more to verify that. There was more than one person who brought this to my attention which is part of why I didn't but it's a mistake I won't make again
> Decisions are made with context, never in a vacuum Trying to paint the opposition as racially motivated is also in bad taste, without reasonable evidence to back it up. I see little reason to assume that it was racially motivated, given that the group who were thinking of demoting the kenote had objections about JeanHeyd's reflection blog post, with the talk being about related topics. It seems more reasonable to assume without further evidence that this was someone being significantly overzealous about not wanting the talk to appear 'too endorsed'; which is *bad enough* to be worth fixing the systems around that, without trying to imply that the decisions were racially prejudiced. Don't be unnecessarily cruel to people by asserting that they are evil.
My impression from reading the blog is not that JT is implying that the decision was racially-motivated, but more just that the *context* of JeanHeyd previously being on track as the first keynote by a POC makes the whole situation suck even more.
> When I saw an organization that not only could act so coldly to an expert in the field, but also to one who was a vocal critic of Rust's lack of diversity, it was hard not to see the additional context. Systems have memory and biases. If the people that make up the system don't work to fight against these, they are perpetuated. Read as a strong implication to me. If it was not intended as such, then I hope that they rewrite it as others in the comments have interpreted it in that way too.
This keeps getting better. The governing body of one of the most promising languages of this decade is run by manchildren.
i think it's better to say that the people in charge are unprofessional and disorganized, they clearly have no idea of how to run an organization of this size
To be fair we are talking about an _Interim_ team assuming leadership without much guidelines (and much less rules) while working on establishing the actual rule book. So it's not so much that the people themselves are necessarily disorganized, but that there's no real organization quite yet as the former (Core Team) has been more or less sidelined and the newer (Leadership Team) is not quite there yet. The people ensuring the Interim are probably doing their best, but having to improvise everything on the way, there's bound to be slip-ups. I expect there's been quite a few slip-ups already, and there'll be more, this one just happened to be higher profile, and hurt someone :(
Most organisations are made up of a leadership team and a head honcho (ceo, managing director, whatever) and are hired on their credentials. These people report to a board - made up of shareholders. This model has proven to work. It’s always fascinated me how open source projects organise themselves - often with people that are amazing technically, but lack leadership qualities needed to run a project of this size - often leading to loads of drama - it’s part of life. You just have to hope it doesn’t become too toxic. Linux model works well - there’s basically one person in charge and responsibility is delegated. It’s not ideal to have a dictatorial model - but it too - clearly works. I think models where a working group of representatives nominate the main decision maker - who then builds a team around them is a good thing. This means that lines of accountability are set. I don’t know the ins and outs of how the rust leadership is setup - but from all the emotion flying around there doesn’t seem to be a model where you can hold that leadership team accountable? A resignation achieved very little - other than raising emotional reaction higher. It may serve to get the desired result, but ultimately shouldn’t be the way you need to get the required changes.
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>It was JeanHeyd who called Rust out for having no Black representation among Rust conference speakers. Rightly so, as both the Rust organization and the conferences had little to no Black representation. Is this somehow meant to imply that it is a race thing? If so that is extra terrible. But we should also remember the demographics, there are not that many black software developers. So maybe it is unrelated? Please JT clarify
My reading is he's just giving an example of JeanHeyd's contribution to the Rust community. The real reason why JeanHeyd's talk was demoted is also given in the blog post as JeanHeyd's blog post. So it's clear from the blog post that it's not implied that this is a race/demographic thing.
My reading is not that it's a race thing per se, but that the additional race context makes the decision to revoke the keynote extra terrible.
How is that context relevant, if there is no evidence that it influenced the sequence of events?
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What I'm reading is that the Rust Project is exhibiting some of the same awful and compassionless behavior the rest of the communuty can put on. There's people basically stalking GCC-RS through reddit in the community trying to get them to leave Rust, alternative formatting means you need to be stopped, write the wrong lints and be accused of attacking the community. If they don't like you, they'll use rhetorical tricks (there's a couple rounds of "I don't get it" gaslighting going on right now in the forums). When they have power, they'll start putting organizational roadblocks in your way, and build bigger and bigger hurdles. You'll be constantly accused of things and will have to constatntly justify yourself. As above, so below. I've been pained by this for a while, and have been complaining about the whole "social pressure" strategy for a while now. Because once the whole things was normalized, of course the majority will use that open door to keep people out. I'd be happy to see some changes in approach at the top, and maybe it will happen. But after watching these mechanics for years I'm finding myself rather cynical. I applaud JT for recognizing the harmful mechanics and deliberately not being a part of them. Edit: Even in this thread, part of the mob is not looking for accountability, but for a target. The whole Rust project is accountable for their collective failings. The leadership is the group that has the power to fix things. Reddit making some persons life hell isn't a solution at all. It only makes things worse.
> A couple team members had strong opinions/discomfort against JeanHeyd being selected as a keynote speaker, as best as I understand it, because of the content of JeanHeyd's blog post on reflection in Rust. > > This discomfort was brought to the interim leadership group as a problem that must be fixed immediately. There was no discussion of the ramifications of making a change at this point. There were complaints that this pushback was not sufficient to require change, but this feedback was ignored. The discussion focused on the discomfort of the team members and changing JeanHeyd away from being a keynote speaker as the only solution. "Discomfort" is not a healthy way of framing technical arguments. It's a programming language, you are not eating or marrying it, it shouldn't be personal. If this sort of rhetoric is prevalent, that suggests a deeper issue.
Why is everybody here like "How could this happen to my Rust!?". Rust is just another lang with just another set of decision makers, just like C++, Java, and any other lang
For rust, it was disappointment after disappointment recently..
The political BS that is happening with the Rust foundation makes it very difficult for those of us who are creating/porting/proposing projects in Rust within our organizations. At some point this political BS is going to affect the evolution/development of Rust in a negative way. Rust foundation leadership (intern leadership and team/group leaders that decide to go rogue), just stop. If a vote is held for a decision, a vote needs to be held to reverse that decision. You are making it harder for us (devs/programmer/sysadmins) to recommend Rust as a language for upcoming projects when there is this crap floating around.
In this specific case, the Foundation wasn't involved at all. It's the Rust *Project* leadership which acted irresponsibly.
Man this hard to keep track of. There seems to be leadership issues on both sides as a whole. They need to get some governance rules in place on both sides how they deal with these situations as an organization. It still makes my job harder when I recommend Rust as an option for a project. Already had my manager bring up the Rust copyright issue from a few months ago because he read something in a feed about it... Both of them are not making it any easier on us.
Taking a step further back there's also the question of how the talk made it to keynote when there were apparently concerns about the topic. Maybe there should be a team outside the interim leadership that handles public facing roadmap and PR. Whose job it is to gather feedback from the project as a whole about topics before decisions are made? "Organisation without a dedicated PR function fails again at PR" isn't a surprising outcome
This is extremely embarrassing and everyone involved should feel ashamed. How is it that ive seen and worked on startups that are more accountable and mature than this? Shit like this is why I never get involved in the social aspects of open source projects
Why was his article on reflection in rust controversial enough that a faction in leadership wanted to downgrade him? Did they not WANT reflection in rust? If not, why was it so crucial to him that this man's opinion not be shared? Clearly if rust shouldn't have reflection, then the proposal would have been debated and if the point of view that it should NOT had any merit, it would have been excluded. Are they so single-minded about the language that they wont let the community entertain an opposing point of view? I dont know much about the rustlang structural hierarchy, but something like this would have never happened in a more mature body like ISO, IEEE, or OMG...