# What HOLY BLOOD WARS exist in your profession? **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [May 14, 2013, 7:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300 "2013-05-14T07:08:12Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Ruken](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/f475e1/32.png) [@Ruken](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ruken)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/41 "2013-05-15T02:24:38Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Secondary education - the knives really come out between departments as to what style we should be teaching the students: APA, MLA, something else. We generally gang up on the English Department and decided “Not what they want.” 😛 Interesting that you even need to “teach” a style, let alone a particular one. The kids are going to have to write to multiple styles down the road. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/42 "2013-05-15T02:31:14Z")
Well, there is the basic war between the upper management and money folks who want the world from the network but who feel that the IT budget is ‘astronomical’, and figure that we paid $X 10 years ago, why do we have to buy new stuff now (while driving up the requirements and ignoring little things like that security stuff) and the IT staff trying to make all this old crap work and explain to the money people why it might be a good idea to update some of the infrastructure, think about security and consider why backing up the data might be a good thing. The other really basic war is between the double E’s who think they know everything and are the only ‘real’ engineers, and us poor dumb network ‘engineers’ who have to make it all somehow work. 😛 ---
**Author:** ![Noelq](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noelq/32/16438_2.png) [@Noelq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noelq)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/43 "2013-05-15T02:31:55Z")
> [@nashiitashii](#): > > Are you posting from a typewriter? If not, then you can ignore this rule. 😉 Its amazing how someone with so much life experience could be SO WRONG, bless your heart. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Noelq](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noelq/32/16438_2.png) [@Noelq](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noelq)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/44 "2013-05-15T02:33:01Z")
> [@Ethilrist](#): > > Is not. Is two. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 3:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/45 "2013-05-15T03:30:33Z")
> [@ChockFullOfHeadyGoodness](#): > > Apparently you’ve never had the misfortune to work on a federal government contract. I’ve sat through meetings to come up with coding standards (the government requires deliverable code to follow a published standard, but you’re allowed to define your own standard) where 10 people on the the taxpayers’ dime spent 20 minutes arguing whether a tab should expand to 2 spaces or 3 spaces. We also spent 45 minutes arguing the aforementioned curly brace placement issue. > The good thing about code standards is once you finally have one, the holy wars are over and the losers have to suck it up and shut up (well, they should shut up, but they don’t. But it’s easy to shut them down with “just follow the fucking standards. It’s part of the award fee”). I actually was a data forensics consultant for a while, and ultimately got fired because I thought the coding standards were stupid, and wouldn’t shut up about it. Long story short, the manager consultants thought it would be a grand idea to come up with some Byzantine and ornate coding standards- 3 spaces here, a capital letter, etc… and I asked why we didn’t just modify the standards to match one of the available SQL formatters- we could both format it absolutely consistently and save ourselves the trouble of manually fucking around with such mind-numbing crap. I got told they didn’t like those standards… they liked the look of the other ones. I told them it was patently dumb, and I didn’t go get a BS, MS and MBA to spend hours obsessing over retarded stuff like this, if I can get a program to do it for me. I also said that I thought it was unethical and lame to charge our clients upwards of $300 per hour for us to do this crap if we could have a program do it in seconds. They did NOT like to hear that. Ultimately, I think my insubordination put me on the chopping block first when layoffs came, but overall, I’m better off for it. So I do have some experience with what you’re talking about, and still think it’s retarded to do it by hand. ---
**Author:** ![Gleena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b3f665/32.png) [@Gleena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gleena)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 3:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/46 "2013-05-15T03:39:51Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > The only area I can think of, offhand, that does generate this type of heat is in labour law, but that’s not so much a dispute about law, as that labour law is one of the most ideological areas. Management lawyers tend to have one ideological mind-set, while union lawyers tend to have a different ideological mind-set, and the legal disputes tend to be a proxy for those clashes of ideology. Yeah, but ours in Australia tends to be native title. That’s where you see the clashes of personal ideology played out, at least in academia. Y’all sorted that shit out, though, so I suspect in Greater Canukistan, there’s not many proxy arguments on this. (I am really admiring of your native title laws and Charter rights, by the way. Seriously.) Oh oh! In conveyancing law, to advise for insurance for both vendor and purchaser before the sale, or not, even though the Conveyancing Act says risk is on V until completion? Do you advise P to take out insurance or not, and does the Conveyancing Act actually cure the mischief there? What if v allows his insurance to lapse, amirite? Also, do you advise for a caveat between exchange and purchase? Cost vs Black v Garnock. ---
**Author:** ![Gleena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b3f665/32.png) [@Gleena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gleena)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 3:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/47 "2013-05-15T03:43:27Z")
> [@Lsura](#): > > I had to look up what those were. Ivory tower me…yeah. > > In academic library land: > > Librarians and faculty status/tenure > DDA(demand-driven acquisition) or not > Just-in-case collections vs. Just-in-time collections > Deathly silence Vs. talking allowed > Food Vs. no food (I think this one has been settled in favor of food, but it may still be debated some places) > > I’m sure there are a bunch. We’re an argumentative bunch when you get right to it. Law library user - please enforce deathly silence, but let me eat because I’m there for 12 hours. Kthx. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/48 "2013-05-15T10:26:27Z")
> [@Noelq](#): > > Its amazing how someone with so much life experience could be SO WRONG, bless your heart. 😉 But even official style manuals are disagreeing with you now. Times change, love, and you’re getting left behind. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![nashiitashii](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7c8e57/32.png) [@nashiitashii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nashiitashii)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/49 "2013-05-15T10:28:04Z")
> [@Gleena](#): > > Law library user - please enforce deathly silence, but let me eat because I’m there for 12 hours. Kthx. 🙂 Different libraries need different environments. If the library has study rooms and you have a need for absolute silence, book a study room. As long as you’re in an acknowledged quiet area (there’ll usually be some sort of signage if the library is big enough to have separate “quiet” and “chatter” areas), you can have silence enforced. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![Lsura](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7993a0/32.png) [@Lsura](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lsura)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 11:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/50 "2013-05-15T11:11:32Z")
> [@nashiitashii](#): > > From what I understand, there are a lot of cataloging-based arguments; now that the standards have changed dramatically, I can only imagine it’ll continue. Ooh, the MARC/RDA wars? I think that one’s over, but could be wrong. (I’m not a cataloger and I’m perfectly happy as long as I can help my patrons find what they need. 🙂 ) ---
**Author:** ![Sailboat](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/sailboat/32/461_2.png) [@Sailboat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sailboat)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 12:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/51 "2013-05-15T12:23:18Z")
Regarding the “one or two spaces after period?” rule, I do want to mention that the one-space people are provably, measurably wrong about one of their primary assertions – that it makes no difference visually because of modern kerned fonts. It is noticeable. At my job, the rule is “two spaces,” and let me tell you, the people I work with spot _every single one-spaced sentence_, usually immediately. Regarding “we only did two spaces because of typewriters,” I think that’s also missing the fact that had-written sentences tend to have just a little extra space between them. Frankly, IMHO, it makes it easier to read the text to have the separation, like all properly-used whitespace does, serving as cues to how something should be read. Inexatlythesamewaythis_doen’t_. I read very fast and I’ve been reading for decades. I know kerned fonts in books have one space. That doesn’t mean it’s optimal for the reader, just because it’s done. I put up with it in books, but I frequently do notice that there’s “not enough space” between sentences and they look slightly run together. ---
**Author:** ![HoneyBadgerDC](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/honeybadgerdc/32/1033_2.png) [@HoneyBadgerDC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HoneyBadgerDC)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 1:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/52 "2013-05-15T13:04:40Z")
" The White Wood Wars" The old time purists and southern boys claimed a decent bow and arrow could only be made form osage orange or pacific yew. The new commers to bow building were in a different camp led by Tim Baker claiming bows and arrows could be made from most any wood including boards from the hardware store. After about 10 years of bitter fighting we all agreed to meet for a shootout in Missouri. The white woods won the battle and the two camps melded together. ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/53 "2013-05-15T14:11:18Z")
One space after periods, you old farts. How about console vs PC wars? Not a month ago I saw one Doper ask another Doper “Why are you playing it on a console? Are you fucking retarded?” To my everloving surprise, the other Doper, instead of getting angry, came back and sheepishly apologized. Why can’t we all play on whatever’s easy and convenient for us. I hear a lot of the camera wars, too. I have a Canon. Hands off! I love the thing and it’s great for my amateur photography. ---
**Author:** ![Amateur\_Barbarian](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/59ef9b/32.png) [@Amateur\_Barbarian](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Amateur_Barbarian)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/54 "2013-05-15T14:19:00Z")
After 30+ years in publications, I no longer argue the one-v-two period space thing; I just hit my macro key to strip all extra spaces from any work document submitted. Sometimes there are thousands because the same people arguing for “two” are using multiple spaces and tabs to position things on the page as well. I hate playing games on the limited controller of a console. The fine control of having a dozen or more specific action keys is infinitely superior to mashing A-B-[direction] as fast as you can. Canon or Nikon, I have no heart in the argument but I recently replaced my entire photo/video gear set starting with a Canon 5D that has generated 5X cost in income in less than a year (and photo/video is a small part of what I do). ---
**Author:** ![Anaamika](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Anaamika](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Anaamika)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 2:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/55 "2013-05-15T14:25:53Z")
> [@Amateur\_Barbarian](#): > > I hate playing games on the limited controller of a console. The fine control of having a dozen or more specific action keys is infinitely superior to mashing A-B-[direction] as fast as you can. It entirely depends on what games you are playing. First person shooters, world building games, and strategy games - all best on the PC. Lengthy RPGs? Work just fine on the controller. And I don’t have to upgrade my system like I’d have to keep upgrading my PC just to keep up with the games. I don’t have to search for patches. If there are updates to the game, they download automatically. I don’t have to install games (unless I want to). I just pop in the games and play. See, that’s what I don’t get. I freely admit some games are better on the PC - I play Minecraft exclusively on the PC, and I even have a Steam account. The graphics are better on the PC too…but for people to say I have no reason to play on a console whatsoever, that’s wrong. There are reasons to play it. Right now I am working and going back to school at the same time. I have limited time to play, and when I do, I want to just pop a disk in and play. I don’t want to have to mess around with settings or figure stuff out, or install. I just want to play it. ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/56 "2013-05-15T21:56:57Z")
> [@bump](#): > > I actually was a data forensics consultant for a while, and ultimately got fired because I thought the coding standards were stupid, and wouldn’t shut up about it. > > Long story short, the manager consultants thought it would be a grand idea to come up with some Byzantine and ornate coding standards- 3 spaces here, a capital letter, etc… and I asked why we didn’t just modify the standards to match one of the available SQL formatters- we could both format it absolutely consistently and save ourselves the trouble of manually fucking around with such mind-numbing crap. > > I got told they didn’t like those standards… they liked the look of the other ones. I told them it was patently dumb, and I didn’t go get a BS, MS and MBA to spend hours obsessing over retarded stuff like this, if I can get a program to do it for me. I also said that I thought it was unethical and lame to charge our clients upwards of $300 per hour for us to do this crap if we could have a program do it in seconds. They did NOT like to hear that. > > Ultimately, I think my insubordination put me on the chopping block first when layoffs came, but overall, I’m better off for it. > > So I do have some experience with what you’re talking about, and still think it’s retarded to do it by hand. I agree with the notion that it should be controlled by an automated tool, but at least to a certain degree coding standards are important. Maybe not the weird “three spaces here” stuff (or even “curly brace on the wrong line” stuff), but things like variable naming conventions, comment formatting, for vs while etiquette. The fact is, most of a programmer’s interaction with code isn’t writing it – it’s maintaining it. And on top of that, people don’t stay at one company forever, you’re going to have new people that need to look at old code. Making your code as consistent looking as possible makes it easier to understand everything. It’s really jarring when you go between two files in the same package and they have completely different formatting and conventions, it’s just a much bigger pain to work with. > [@Anaamika](#): > > It entirely depends on what games you are playing. First person shooters, world building games, and strategy games - all best on the PC. Lengthy RPGs? Work just fine on the controller. > > And I don’t have to upgrade my system like I’d have to keep upgrading my PC just to keep up with the games. > > I don’t have to search for patches. If there are updates to the game, they download automatically. > > I don’t have to install games (unless I want to). I just pop in the games and play. > > See, that’s what I don’t get. I freely admit some games are better on the PC - I play Minecraft exclusively on the PC, and I even have a Steam account. The graphics are better on the PC too…but for people to say I have no reason to play on a console whatsoever, that’s wrong. There are reasons to play it. > > Right now I am working and going back to school at the same time. I have limited time to play, and when I do, I want to just pop a disk in and play. I don’t want to have to mess around with settings or figure stuff out, or install. I just want to play it. Of course, you know by now that the true hardcore PC elitists will nitpick that you can plug a controller into a PC and many PC games will recognize them :p. (I agree with you, for the record, I’ve just seen this argument so many times I know the song by heart) ---
**Author:** ![Jragon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e19b73/32.png) [@Jragon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jragon)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/57 "2013-05-15T22:05:10Z")
Oooh, comment etiquette reminds me of another one. I’ve met several programmers who very much despise comments, and argue that if you need to comment your code, you’re a terrible programmer and need to write better, clearer code. For the record, this is one I vehemently disagree with. While I agree that overcommenting or “obvious commenting” (time=Now // sets the time to now) is a real problem, I disagree with the notion that all code must be inherently intuitive, even when done right. Sometimes the “right way” to do things is just naturally unintuitive without a comment, especially if you’re optimizing. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/58 "2013-05-15T22:30:16Z")
> [@Northern\_Piper](#): > > This may sound counter-intuitive, but in my line of work (lawyering) I can’t think of anything that is likely to be as divisive as some of the above examples. > > The reason, I think, is that as lawyers, we are trained to always look at the other side of the equation, to think what the other arguments might be; and, there’s always the possibility that some day, we might be arguing the other side for a client. It is by nature a sceptical and agnostic profession (not in the theological sense, but in the “I need to be convinced” sense). > > The only area I can think of, offhand, that does generate this type of heat is in labour law, but that’s not so much a dispute about law, as that labour law is one of the most ideological areas. Management lawyers tend to have one ideological mind-set, while union lawyers tend to have a different ideological mind-set, and the legal disputes tend to be a proxy for those clashes of ideology. One that used to exist was case citations - the old guard used to insist that every case cited in a factum or reproduced in a casebook be from a “proper” printed case citation service, and not from a computer database like Quicklaw. So, if you were using Quicklaw, you had to go and find a cited version of the same case, rather than just slapping the Quicklaw version into your casebook. This one appears to have mostly fallen by the wayside. ---
**Author:** ![Gleena](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/b3f665/32.png) [@Gleena](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gleena)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/59 "2013-05-15T22:41:35Z")
> [@nashiitashii](#): > > Different libraries need different environments. If the library has study rooms and you have a need for absolute silence, book a study room. As long as you’re in an acknowledged quiet area (there’ll usually be some sort of signage if the library is big enough to have separate “quiet” and “chatter” areas), you can have silence enforced. 😃 Study rooms are for more than one person, and like hen’s teeth. Quiet areas seem to be merely suggestions and not rules. It’s cool though. I’m sure there’s too many undergrads at my uni, so I can cull the ones giggling and gossiping under the Quiet Study Please sign. I think the uni won’t miss them if they…disappear. 😃 After all exams are well past the payment due date, so they’ve paid tuition already, amirite? Win win, really. ---
**Author:** ![Mona\_Lisa\_Simpson](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ce7236/32.png) [@Mona\_Lisa\_Simpson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mona_Lisa_Simpson)\ **Post date:** [May 15, 2013, 10:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300/60 "2013-05-15T22:45:21Z")
> [@WhyNot](#): > > Employer mandated vaccines for nurses. I don’t get it. There’s a group of people who have studied science for 4+ years, who explain and administer vaccines to other people, and who are livid and outraged when asked to get a flu shot so they don’t Typhoid Mary their geriatric patients. WTF? I think it’s a “You’re not the boss of me!” thing, more than any scientific standing. That’s exactly more or less what I came in to say. A nurse “Georgio” who is doing his Masters and is the son of a public health nurse became a union rep to grieve the whole mandated flu shot thing. He somehow tried to make my pro flu shot comment into “anti-choice” and did this whole thing about how he has the right to “autonomy over my body”. I wanted to point out that his right to autonomy stops where taxpayers are funding health care and keeping people well. I just shut up. Does not value. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-holy-blood-wars-exist-in-your-profession/658300.md?page=4)