"The Embarrassing Ruby/Rails Subreddit Chronicles" becomes "The Embarrassing Ruby/Rails Community Chronicles" as it expands to cover embarrasing interactions by bad Ruby/Rails devs all across social media and the real world, exposing rudeness, meanness, discrimination, and unexcellence/unintelligence in the Ruby/Rails worldwide community. The goal of course is to call that out to discourage in favor of true Rubyist MINASWAN attitudes and behaviors instead (Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice).
While going through the recurrent Bystander Intervention training for my job, I stumbled upon "Persistent unwanted personal questions" being mentioned as a form of verbal abuse.
I have to confess I recently experienced that at a Ruby tech event. A bad Ruby dev (the kind you'd find on the Ruby/Rails subreddits) kept rudely asking me what my salary was after I told him I won awards by Matz (the creator of Ruby) for my open-source projects. Any normal Rubyist would have asked me about my open-source projects instead, just out of normal Software Engineering curiosity to learn better ways of serving customers with Ruby. Instead, he kept prying very hard about my salary and was unwilling to accept the fact that it's rude to ask people he doesn't know for their salary.
After I gave him multiple examples of how previous companies I worked at had policies against people asking about salaries because knowing the answer could cause envy and create bad relationships, citing a real story of that happening at one of my previous jobs when someone's salary leaked, he pivotted towards asking me if "I felt uncomfortable answering". He kept insisting on me answering that new question instead going forward. The person was already coming across by that point as a very terrible rude unprofessional person due to literally attempting to make me feel uncomfortable with incessent questioning.
He sounded like he desperately wanted to "win the conversation/situation" in any way possible (of me having won awards he hasn't won, instead of being humble/happy for me) by trying to make me "look bad" as someone who is "weak" due to being "uncomfortable". That revealed to me what his original intention and ulterior motive was behind asking for my salary: He just wanted to make me "look bad". I'm sure he was going to tell me my salary was too low no matter what answer I would have provided, as a trap, to insult me and render me "unimportant" even if I've won awards by Matz. As if the awards were about me "being important" or "making more money" as opposed to ensuring I serve customers with the best quality work possible (which is what awards are really about from the perspective of truly ethical excellent people who don't prioritize greed or pride over customer service).
What a ridiculous interaction that was! I finally answered him by saying "it's not about me being uncomfortable. It's just a bad practice/etiquette to ask for someone's salary, especially if you don't know them well, and I won't endorse/enable that practice by answering the question even if I were comfortable with answering it."
The dude confessed to me eventually that he doesn't work in Ruby anymore because he lost a political battle at work, so he is now a Python developer even though Ruby is more effective than Python at building his work application. What a loser! That's exactly the kind of pushover rude loser my team would never hire and would screen for during the interviewing phase of hiring. We don't want devs who lose political battles for what technology decisions are best for serving customers. I have won many many such political battles at my company over the years, and it was because I'm no pushover. A bad dev being unethical goes hand in hand with other bad attributes like being a pushover, which is why we never hire such devs in the first place.
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