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I will NEVER respect authority.

This is a rant.  Hit (S)top now if you don't want to hang around while I vent my spleen.

I don't respect authority.  Authority does not, by itself, deserve respect.  Go take your position of authority and shove it.

Respect is EARNED.  I've said so on this blog before.  There are people with authority in my life who I respect, because they've shown themselves to be inspirational and competent leaders.  Show me that you know what you're doing, prove to me that you've earned your position of leadership, and I will be the greatest team player you have ever worked with.  That's because you have earned my respect, and among people wired like me, respect is the currency of the realm.  

On the other hand, if you pull rank for no reason, if you micromanage people who have more experience and knowledge than you, it doesn't matter if your rank says that you're the emperor of the galaxy; you've lost my respect and I don't respect your authority.  If you're lucky I will leave your team.

I've had the blessing of working with some truly wonderful leaders.  These are relationships that transcend any reporting structure because everyone gets on the same page.  And even when there's a disagreement, I find it acceptable to let the person in charge make the final decision on something, because they've demonstrated that they've earned the right to do that.   (Hint: it's always "because of X, Y, and Z" rather than "because I said so.")  Relationships like that can even turn into long term friendships if the conditions are favorable.

So no, I will never respect authority on its own.  Show me that you've earned the respect and you'll get it in spades.  If you don't agree with that, go find some other world to live in that doesn't have me in it.



Posted by IGnatius T Foobar on Mon Feb 03 2020 13:43:33 EST
17 comments | permalink
zooer  says:  Tue Feb 04 2020 08:59:54 EST
This is a comment!

darknetuser  says:  Tue Feb 04 2020 10:22:05 EST
I feel like drawing an A.C.A.B. graffity on this blog for some reason.

IGnatius T Foobar  says:  Tue Mar 10 2020 13:49:21 EDT
Funny, I wasn't thinking of law enforcement when I wrote that, but I suppose police officers do very quickly either earn one's respect or just comply grudgingly with whatever it is they want. The asshole cop who pulled me over in Yonkers nine years ago definitely fell into the second camp.

darknetuser  says:  Tue Mar 10 2020 15:53:38 EDT
I know you were not thinking of LEOs, but in most rich countries LEOs are just tax collectors under other name. I have a bad disregard for tax collectors because I am familiar with their malpractices, using fake charges to get people to pay and such... I think that the creation of a group that bombed tax agencies would be justified in certain countries.

Maybe I am just a bit sour today :)

IGnatius T Foobar  says:  Tue Mar 10 2020 18:30:57 EDT
Ah, I get it now. In the United States we call those people "Silicon Valley executives"

darknetuser  says:  Wed Mar 11 2020 11:35:05 EDT
2020-03-10 18:30 from IGnatius T Foobar
Ah, I get it now. In the United States we call those people "Silicon

Valley executives"



Hahaha, it sounds about right.

People in IT management seem to be made from a different paste than regular living beings. A paste similar to that of vampire bats. Last time I applied to an IT position it left a very sour taste in my mouth.

Also lots of "diversity" politics and discarding candidates because they were not black or womanish enough.

IGnatius T Foobar  says:  Wed Mar 11 2020 18:31:31 EDT
Not IT in general. Silicon Valley specifically.

darknetuser  says:  Wed Mar 11 2020 19:28:16 EDT
2020-03-11 18:31 from IGnatius T Foobar
Not IT in general. Silicon Valley specifically.



I am a pesimistic person. I have seen ugly from people who has not seen California in a postcard.

zooer  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 07:54:33 EDT
The title says "I will NEVER respect authority", do you believe we should defund the police?

darknetuser  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 14:59:10 EDT
2020-06-27 07:54 from zooer
The title says "I will NEVER respect authority", do you believe we

should defund the police?


I know the questions is not aimed at me, but I will take it for the fun.


The police is the tool the government uses to enforce its will, so I consider it generally bad.

Black Lives Matter and their Antifa friends are intellectual despots who are burnt by the mere existence of the police. Yeah, I have heard some founder/organizer or BLM has delcared it to be a Marxist movement...

My opinion is to keep the police as it is so both factions fight and smassh each other, as the rest of the people eats popcorn. And to be frank, I'd rather have the police win.

LoanShark  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 15:04:57 EDT

Not true. BLM is pretty diverse. Yes, there are the usual suspects calling for "reparations", another set calling for "defund the police", but the bulk of the movement is far less hardcore than some of the core activists, as is so often the case.

LoanShark  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 15:07:13 EDT

In any case, it's a no-brainer that when certain police think they can literally get away with racially-motivated murder, there are going to be mass protests, even global ones. That's just the way the world works. The BLM movement is far less toxic than the Black Panthers of decades ago.

IGnatius T Foobar  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 15:24:26 EDT
Not true. BLM is pretty diverse. Yes, there are the usual suspects
calling for "reparations", another set calling for "defund the police",

but the bulk of the movement is far less hardcore than some of the core

activists, as is so often the case.

The question raised was whether I respect the authority of the police. The answer is no, they have to earn respect just as much as anyone else. They are, however, our paid law enforcement officers. I've met good cops and bad cops, most of them are pretty good, but as for respect, each one is neutral until I've had a chance to get to know them a bit.

Importantly, being polite and courteous to someone in a position of authority is not the same thing as respecting them. I spent a couple of years under an asshole boss who had zero of my respect but I didn't spend my days barking at him about what a shithead I thought he was. Likewise, I didn't put up a fight against the asshole cop who yelled at me and gave me an 11-point ticket because I pulled over in a different place than he was expecting me to.

There are a lot of people who call themselves part of the BLM movement. I think most people and even most participants agree that black lives matter (all lower case) because every life is a precious gift from God and we don't want to see anyone being needlessly oppressed. The groups *calling* themselves BLM, the ones LS is calling "hardcore", I'll just say that I am skeptical that they are in any way grassroots.

Most of my thoughts about respect are derived from a really good article I read over a decade ago:

[ https://www.computerworld.com/article/2527153/opinion-the-unspoken-truth-about-managing-geeks.html ]

LoanShark  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 16:15:35 EDT

One thing about respect (also learned from managing geeks) is that sometimes you have to give someone more respect than what you think they deserve. That's what respect *is*.

Any time somebody asks me to manage geeks these days, I run like hell.

BLM is complicated. I haven't been very open about who I hang around with on here, outside of some months-ago vaguebooking in the Relationships & Sex> room, but suffice to say that a bunch of my friends are very anti-authoritarian. Words like "carceral" and even "comrade" tend to get bandied about, sometimes almost to the point of ridiculousness. But there are reasons. There are crimes on the books that shouldn't be crimes, and people tend to get locked up for life for things that should have been seen as self-defense.

Anyway, I've just never been a go-out-and-protest kind of guy. Never saw the point. Even back in 2003 when I was ranting on here about W, I was not going out and protesting.

But at the beginning of the month, some white girl asked me to go to the FTP4 protest, with my car, to help some other white-girl friend of hers get home safely from the protest in the face of pinhead De Blasio's curfew. And we all know how that turned out; it was a police riot.

I didn't go, because I'm not a big fan of practicing civil disobedience in the South Bronx (no matter how good the cause) in the face of cops who are feeling itchy and have been given carte blanche to bust heads. And we all know how that turned out; the protesters were kettled a few minutes prior to curfew and everyone was basically arrested immediately at the stroke of 8pm.

Again, it's complicated; I can support the right to protest (you pretty much have to; first amendment and all that) and personally support some of the participants while deciding that I can't protest in good conscience at this time. There's a nasty virus going around (I know, I caught it, so I'm probably immune but might not be), and there was that inconsistently, capriciously-enforced curfew, and they were throwing people in overcrowded, potentially covid-ridden holding cells ostensibly to enforce a curfew that was ostensibly about mitigating covid risk? Many of us feel that this wasn't the right way for De Blasio and the police to deal with the situation. And the funny thing is, *nobody* on the entire political spectrum from far-left to far-right feels that De Blasio is doing a good job at this point. Score one for the protesters. And De Blasio is out; thank good for term limits and good riddance to bad rubbish.

But score -1 for the protesters because the BTLM protest near Brooklyn Museum a few days later was just *huge*, and with covid going around it just looks hypocritical. The left is going to learn to deal with that.

Well we all are. It seems like our collective mood is dictated by the news cycle, and we all have the attention span of gnats, or cats; suddenly covid was forgotten after one random murder, and everyone was out in the streets again: liberals defying liberal bans on large-crowd-gatherings. For once, I would prefer if people kept their eyes on the ball.

LoanShark  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 16:25:18 EDT

One sentence from IG's article:

"IT pros will prefer a jerk who is always right over a nice person who is always wrong."

No. Just no. Not correct. Deeply and profoundly not correct, and runs counter to my life experience in important ways, and especially ironic considering the article earlier stated "respect is the currency of the realm."

That sentence represents the old way of thinking. The new way of thinking is being dominated by newbies who need respect. The whole fucking point is that you need to be nice to people who made a fucking mistake on a technical issue. People make mistakes.


If you're correct, but an asshole about it, people will start filling HR complaints about you and you will be out of a job if it happens often enough. It's that simple.

IGnatius T Foobar  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 17:21:33 EDT
That sentence represents the old way of thinking. The new way of
thinking is being dominated by newbies who need respect. The whole
fucking point is that you need to be nice to people who made a fucking

mistake on a technical issue. People make mistakes.

True, but the focus of that thought was primarily on managers. The manager of an IT group ought not to be a newbie. Also the article was written 11 years ago, and much has changed with regard to the way people are mandated to treat each other in the workplace.

With regard to newbies, I'll give a lot more respect to one who is directionally accurate but made a newbie mistake, than to a self-entitled brat, or to someone who is simply a lazy open-ended time sink ... and it's pretty easy to tell the difference. At my workplace I get pinged by a lot of people who need some help, because I have a reputation for knowing the ropes and being generally helpful. If they respect my time, I respect their need to learn. I love making new friends that way and empowering them on the path to awesomeness. On the other hand, there are some who I have in my ignore list because they are just passively consuming time without learning anything.

Thankfully, we're a company with a midwestern culture so we don't have a lot of the entitled-millennial stereotype that infest CA and NY based companies.
If we did, I'd be doling out a whole lot less respect.

LoanShark  says:  Sat Jun 27 2020 17:51:56 EDT
Thankfully, we're a company with a midwestern culture so we don't have


try having a midwestern culture when you've got a significant subset of developers who are foreign-domiciled consultants.

I'm currently *liking* the consultants at my current employer. It's our second go-round with them. They built our first solution on node.js, and we moved away from it and ramped down our involvement with them, out of frustration. But after we successfully rebuild our backend service, in New York, on a different technology stack, we ramped them back up again and taught them how to do things our way. We're pretty happy now, in no small part just because our technology stack no longer feels alien to us (node.js really sucks sometimes), and we only have ourselves to blame if we can't pick up their slack.

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