Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”

> I'm sure I'll get downvoted though for calling Linus a baby, because somehow insulting Linus for his flaws is never ok but when Linus does it it's so cool!

I'm pretty sure people aren't up in arms about Linus being a baby, but about your refusal to call out people on "subpar performance". Replace "subpar performance" with whatever you feel is an acceptable name for executing wrongly on very bad ideas.

And I feel like you might get downvoted because if there is one thing I HATE about companies, it's that people responding like this always get rewarded.

1) fuck up beyond belief (or just be assigned to a critical project and do nothing)

2) talk about the problem with everyone, without, of course, without fixing anything

3) inflict massive costs on everyone else because of the sudden urgent necessity of fixing your problem

4) get insane rewards for this

And I for one call statements such as the one from the top post here "optimism at it's finest":

> if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.

Unfortunately, corporate America is FULL, and I mean overloaded to the brim with people who will never admit the slightest mistake, and explode at anyone implying they made a subpar decision.

This attitude to "avoid blame" then proceeds to turn disaster into outright catastrophe. Many of these people who make some level of mistakes will see that not only can they get away with it, but aggressively attacking others for their mistakes comes with great rewards.

I have personally worked with several well known people in my field, who have climbed up the ladder this way. It isn't just that they didn't contribute, but they made great mistakes, both on the technical front (taking disastrous architectural decisions and forcing them through, despite agreement that there were very wrong), and on the financial front (doing budget allocations based on what THEY KNEW was a lost cause, and refusing to admit any fault or change course).

Once it does become clear that a disastrous mistake was made and propagated, and 90% of the budget was already spent (actually more like 150% in both cases), and none of the outcomes promised will be achieved, they then help organise a "code red", a "emergency sprint", an "extra effort", ... to "fix" things. But things are never fixed. Everyone is worse off, and will be for years.

The first few times this happens, these people are then rewarded. Promoted, in both cases. And of course, we are currently in the process of repeating one of these huge mistakes. Last time I so much as asked why this decision was made the guy very enthousiastically gave an answer, and I thought we both agreed it wasn't a good answer.

An hour later my manager asks to urgently see me.

A day later my director urgently called my manager and me to see him.

A week later we went to discuss "safety" with HR. (because of the 10 people thing, I'm sure, read on)

And yet, everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows this is a bad idea. However, having 50 people work for 1.5 years on a bad idea ... well those 50 people call it "a job", and nobody's going to be risking their career on calling this guy out any further (even if I did get 10 of them to walk into that director's office telling him that I did nothing wrong and that it's a bad idea).

But no worries ... no blame. We're still executing on that idea.

I don't disagree, but they are working under a time crunch trying to fix something that is a flaw fundamental to modern chip design.

Hopefully the goal here is to get everything to a secure state, with time to iterate and improve once everyone can sit back and breathe. Hopefully.

I chuckled when I saw this. Google processes and code reviews are extremely passive aggressive and very much inefficient, focusing on things that do not matter to the end user. Lots of subtle politics going to do the smallest thing. Lack of care and quality shows. Google is hardly what one would want to emulate. It may be a business success but that is about it; it's as dysfunctional as anything of its size.

Funnily the first core value is focus on the user. Almost no one there ever cares or thinks from the perspective of the user in decision making. Users are incidental to the things that happen there.

Kool-aid much?!

Like most things we only see one part of these discussions. It might be so that this have built up under several weeks/conversations etc and when nothing happens something needs to be done. In a non-cooperative there’s no boss you can turn to when you are unhappy with the situation, in linux’s case few other actual platforms to “turn” to. What do you do when, online, mostly only have your reputation to influence people.

I’m not defending Linus per se, but he do have a really unique position and it’s probably not easy to be in that position and AFAIKT it works. Maybe if it would have been someone else the world would look, most probably, rather different.

It’s really easy to criticize, but frankly none of us knows how it is to be in his situation and I guess he has to deal with his fair share of trolls, morons and energy thieves.

See, I feel the opposite.

I dream of working on something where the criticism is so honest. Where I don’t have to read between the lines to understand how big of a deal a person considers an issue. Pussyfooting to lessen the blow benefits no one in the long run.

I often end up running my code reviews by other people first to make sure they’re gentle enough because I know people are overly sensitive/attached to their work. It’s a stupid dance and such a waste of everyone’s time. If we could just be honest with each other we could build great things.

I single handledly blame this culture of being nice instead of honest on the total undeniable loss of software qualified across the industry.