Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same: I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid.
And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory.
>Except the tone in all of the stories is overwhelmingly the same
I disagree with this. I think Rachel's blog is fairly aggressive as far as HN submissions go, which doesn't elicit a lot of sympathy. It's pretty argumentative with sniping and a sense of superiority:
>Now, when I run into a thing like this, I start getting snarky and bitchy and start thinking laterally. Like, okay, watch me not use your stupid system but get the answer anyway.
And I don't think that's an unjustified reaction based on the content, but it's also not typical for blog posts that show up here. So the tone is aggressive, and commenters end up being unsympathetic. I completely agree with the parent comment that changing the tone of the post would likely result in a different set of comments (not that the author seems to care).
I've also noticed this in the HN comment section. There's a well-known member who ends up picking fights often in the comments; I usually don't read usernames at all, but if I notice a comment written in a certain bitter, argumentative way, then it's almost always from this person.
I have a different understanding of tone. I'm not stupid, what I'm being asked to do is stupid is the content, the tone is how it's written.
You can sound arrogant, you can call people names, you can sound like you're about to ask to speak to the manager, you can add some self-deprecating jokes, you can show empathy for whoever created the mess while describing the problems you had with said mess etc, that's the tone.
The content stays the same, but people will react very differently to it based on the tone. Some styles work for nearly all audiences, some don't.
And as I said, usually the commenters will give you the benefit of the doubt: yes, that legacy code sounds like it probably sucked, or yes, the client's requirements were nonsensical and contradictory.
Except here.