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Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

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

#811

Post by cribbles »

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions.

> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.

This is completely disingenuous. It's clear from Linus's persistent and cruel personal attacks that he acutely understands many emotions: anger, fear, shame, etc. He attempts to exploit these when he coarsely insults his maintainers. Framing his actions otherwise is a form of deflection.

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

#812

Post by [deleted] »

nomel wrote: post #650
jjeaff wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is anyone really rallied to the cause by Linus himself? I think the product is the only real draw. With the exception of a select few that simply want to work with someone as high profile and legendary as Linus.

Personally, and maybe I’m in the minority when thinking this, but I can’t stand working with polite people. They not only slow down the progress of a project by often causing unneeded busywork, from simply not halting bad ideas, they often slow my learning progress down by not telling me I’m wrong. If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out! There’s obv…

[deleted]

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

#813

Post by emilfihlman »

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.

How do you see the view that you are/were mixing his questions as an attack on you yourself (or against someone else) unnecessarily ("Does he not trust me?", "I know how these things work"), perhaps subconsciously.

It is what I've experienced a lot when dealing with North Americans, criticism is taken as an attack on your person.

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

#815

Post by fareesh »

serf wrote: post #142

I'm probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude. (to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn't do so he gave reasons for his conclusion. in other words : his technica…

You're definitely not alone, it's just that people who agree with you are less likely to speak out because of chilling effects.

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

#816

Post by slx26 »

jernfrost wrote: post #794

I think one has to be fair about what sort of asshole Linus is. He is not like Steve Jobs, Balmer and Gates who could be vindictive and get personal. For Linus it is more about being far too blunt. But you can clearly see Linus himself being aware of it and having some humbleness about it. Jobs in contrast would never admit his bad behavior. As a fellow Nordic (Norwegian) I feel a significant component of this is sim…

Agree. I also think it's very important to point out that he has been doing an insane amount of work, under an insane amount of pressure (and not just external, also internal, by his own character), for decades. Anyone who is minimally obsessive and has been leading a project involving a lot of people for a while knows the feeling. Now, with open source it can get even trickier, and the scale of the work he has been doing is comparable to few other projects.

This is not to excuse him. But when he acknowledges it himself, I think everyone should be empathetic with that. I think that judging without taking the context into account is outright cruel. Universal morality standards are cool, but we shouldn't forget that in the end we are all still just humans. We all make unforgivable mistakes. Only some of us realize and admit them.

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

#817

Post by the_clarence »

staticassertion wrote: post #308

I feel like anyone who says "Linus was harsh but fair" never really read much of what Linus said. Many of his attacks, especially long ago, were quite vitriolic and very much not technical. Oftentimes they weren't rants, just flat out insults, short and mean (I remember, in particular, posts directed towards PaX). They weren't productive, there wasn't a brash technical take buried in them - they were just insults. Ma…

People keep saying things like that but no one is linking to threads we can read

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

#818

Post by frant-hartm »

BeetleB wrote: post #665
coffeemug wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, it isn't. For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. So instead you walk it back and say things diplomatically (which is a tiny form of a white lie). Then people reply to your diplomatic statement with another diplomatic statement, and pretty soon nobody is saying the thing t…

>it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. "This seems stupid to me" is a considerably lazy statement. What's worse, it doesn't have any meaningful content beyond "I don't like it." I've yet to see anyone's feelings hurt with the following: "I'm rejecting your proposition because I believe it will lead to X, Y and Z (problems)" "Your proposal is not going to…

>Your proposal is not going to work

and

>I'm not seeing the benefit of this

are very indirect statements in my vocabulary.

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

#820

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]
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