Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off • Hacker News Board

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#511

Post by DoreenMichele » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:24 AM UTC

eloff wrote: post #458

Agreeableness in general is negatively correlated with career success. Have you noticed that Fortune 500 CEOs tend to be extremely disagreeable, to the point of psychopathy in some cases. At the risk of sticking my neck out, it's also one of the many reasons for the gender pay gap, woman are more agreeable than men. And you have to be somewhat disagreeable to stand up for yourself and demand a raise (or quit and seek…

I've heard it said that woman who are not mothers earn 95 cents to every dollar a man earns.

What I have read is that in the US, women who are childless and without a man earn 98 percent of what men with comparable education and experience make. My stats are probably out of date, so 95 cents on the dollar may be more accurate.

Just suggesting it probably isn't terribly far off, from what I gather, having read up on such a fair amount over the years due to my gender.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#512

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #409

moosingin3space wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linus Torvalds is uniquely qualified Gotta stop you right there. Hero worship should not be considered a good thing in our industry. The kernel subsystem maintainers, who actually review the code prior to getting it merged, are the ones with the real power and the necessary knowledge, and I'd argue they are more qualified to oversee the project's future than Torvalds.

Yeah, just like regular employees are better qualified to run a company than the CEO. No one is more qualified than Linus to run this project and he's done a damn good job so far. Has he made mistakes? Sure. He's human.

> Yeah, just like regular employees are better qualified to run a company than the CEO.

I think you could pretty easily adapt Tolstoy's argument to business and say that the primary role of a CEO is to ratify all the on-the-spot decisions his subordinates made as events got away from them.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#513

Post by diplocorp » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

azernik wrote: post #286

jakeinspace wrote: post #257

Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…

I think there's a delicate way to be both "firm" and "polite" - and that's to not be pretend to be "agreeable", but rather to separate the firmness on technical issues from politeness on personal description. That is, to say "this code is awful" while also a) going out of your way to praise the things co-workers/subordinates do well, and b) when it is appropriate to make general judgments on their performance, make i…

To me, the most important thing is to a) seperate the person from their product b) be constructive. By that I mean saying "this code you wrote is bad and here's why" instead of "you are a bad coder and you should feel bad".

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#514

Post by emodendroket » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:25 AM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #492

moosingin3space wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that when a company reaches a certain size and stability level, as long as the CEO is competent and understands how to balance external and internal issues, the particular CEO doesn't matter that much. The real power over product direction comes from the PMs, VPs, etc. That's my argument -- Linus isn't uniquely qualified to run the Linux kernel project, since he's barely even involved in the direction of the…

> the particular CEO doesn't matter that much Business history & Jack Welch disagree with you. Individual project success is incredibly nuanced and individuals - even in 10k+ orgs - can have massive impacts. Trying to pretend that outliers don't massively influence company success is naive, and MBA programs study these individuals because they are the exception and not the rule. There's a reason we have Madison Squar…

Consider how few "genius CEOs'" reputations have survived their attempts to take over failing companies and turn them around.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#515

Post by dnomad » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:27 AM UTC

DC-3 wrote: post #343

tptacek wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People may divide neatly into factions, but ideas don't. The notion that an un-objectionable code of conduct is somehow allied with a far-reaching political philosophy is reductive and unhelpful. What you're saying is that you'd be comfortable with Linus adopting a code of conduct that made exactly the same statements, so long as the word order was changed to keep it from literally being the Contributor Covenant.

I'm not opposed to the adoption of this CoC. I think it's a positive for the Linux community, and I think it will be helpful (so long as Linus changes his attitude too). I would not like to see this ideological wedge driven any deeper into the gospel of the Linux community, however.

The fact that you think that it's an "ideological wedge" says more about you than anything about the evolution of linux community. Some people see threats everywhere, they go through their whole lives insisting X is really Y, and A will lead to B and therefore nothing should ever change. Since these people are irrational and provide no rational basis for their paranoia (or even historical examples) healthy organizations will tend to completely ignore them.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#516

Post by Spooky23 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:29 AM UTC

jakeinspace wrote: post #257

Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…

Agreeableness is the attribute imo. There’s a scale from “spineless” to “actively squelching dissent”. Agreeable side of the scale people always get rolled in direct confrontation.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#517

Post by CoryShmallager » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:30 AM UTC

darkengine wrote: post #447

CoryShmallager wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerably How do you figure? Genuinely curious. I think you have to take into account where in the world you're talking about. Perhaps in metropolitan parts of the world this is true, but for other large swaths of the world, especially in politics not just individuals, the opposite is happening with authoritarianism prevailing. It's a pretty stark contrast between…

When authoritarianism is prevailing, the shrinking of the Overton window is, to my mind, exactly what one would expect.

It seems like no matter what wing of the spectrum both sides are shrinking their windows and growing in reactionary frustrations.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#518

Post by antod » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:31 AM UTC

hnzix wrote: post #488

LaGrange wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much the opposite of postmodernism actually is.

I was forced to take a unit of postmodernism as part of my studies and came away no wiser as to what postmodernism actually is. There was a bunch of dense, impenetrable academic word games that seemed to be asserting that all truth is culturally relative. I don't find gravity or physics to be culturally relative.

> I don't find gravity or physics to be culturally relative.

But isn't relativity all about your frame of reference?

(sorry)

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#519

Post by geofft » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:32 AM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #314

jakeinspace wrote: post #257

Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…

He's not just stubborn, persistent, and unyielding: he's performatively so. In his most notorious attacks, he's clearly playing to an audience. That could be the problem. He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period") from the performative rudeness ("SHUT THE FUCK UP MAURO"). (I mean, to be clear: what the fuck do I know? I've never been in the position Linus is in.)

> He clearly can separate the blunt stubbornness ("we do not break userland, period")

For what it's worth, he doesn't even avoid breaking userland. Off the top of my head, we had a problem at work a few months back where kernel 4.3 and below rounded up listen(fd, 0) to something nonzero, kernel 4.4 didn't, and a piece of commercial software was (inexplicably) using listen(fd, 0). https://ldpreload.com/blog/git-bisect-run is a post I wrote about tracking that down. (We're slow enough at kernel upgrades at work that it didn't seem worth reporting the regression upstream several releases later.) Also last summer Linus himself merged a commit that very intentionally broke a userspace feature that he didn't like but that Julia and rr both depended on, and got a very polite email (https://lkml.org/lkml/2017/5/29/541) requesting that the behavior be reverted, to which he replied:

    Oh, we'll just re-instate the kernel behavior, it was more an
    optimistic "maybe nobody will notice" thing, and apparently people did
    notice.

which sounds like planning to break userspace to me.

I think that saying he could still be stubborn without being rude is doing everyone a disservice. It's clear that "do not break userspace" isn't actually a rule, and while it's a lot better than cursing out people in public, saying a fake rule very nicely is still going to hurt people, drive away contributors, and fail to attract enough eyeballs to make a high-quality product.

Re: Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

#520

Post by Barrin92 » Mon, Sep 17, 2018, 1:35 AM UTC

jakeinspace wrote: post #257

Linus is stubborn, persistent, and unyielding to what he sees as bullshit. These I believe are all very valuable qualities for the head of a massive software project, and may be part of the reason as to why Linux is where it is today. However, Linus is also a bit of an asshole, turning technical criticism into personal seemingly personal attacks. I believe those 2 sets of qualities are separable, but I would guess it…

>Anecdotally, one of the most effective engineers I worked with, who asked penetrating questions during code and design reviews, did come off as a bit of an asshole at times

Those are simply the people that stand out. It's harder to appreciate professional and nice leadership because if it works it does not even stand out.

If we just take some of the most successful businesses, projects or ventures around and look at their leaders, are most of them abrasive or rude? I wouldn't say that's true. There are certainly some, but they seem to stand out negatively rather than positively, and there is very little to rudeness that actually helps running human organizations.

It's popular to like renegade stories, but Linus outbursts don't improve his leadership, he's a good patron of the Linux project despite of and not because of it.