41–50 of 505 posts
I agree acting professional is not healthy for a real social interaction and you need real social interactions when you're building a collaborative system like Linux.
The only time i act professional is when somebody pissed me off and I'm not in a position to tell him he's a moron without being fired or otherwise get into trouble.
Anyway: just because you act nice and act like you like somebody, doesn't mean you do.
I would much rather a person called me out on my bullshit than them politely skirting around the issue in an attempt to make me feel better and protect my feelings.
I personally have no experience writing kernel code, but I can imagine it's incredibly important that you get things right. So then if getting cursed at means you won't fuck up as often and learn from your mistake, then it works.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just gonna post these two gems I found at a previous thread about Linus ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6050443 ): http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3977141&cid=442916... http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3977141&cid=442909... To me Linus is kinda like Wagner, I do like and enjoy his work, but as a person he is not someone I'd aspire to emulate.
Regarding the last bit, I don’t quite see the point. If I had a wife and she ripped off the sink, put a plastic tub there and called it an improvement, because the metal in the sink could rust, I would be quite clear with her that I think this is a ludicrously stupid idea and she should feel extremely dumb for even thinking of it, her being my wife or not. (Nitpick: Do you mean Richard Wagner or someone called Vagner…
Call it rude or impolite, call it thoughtless or insulting, but don't call it unprofessional. If there's one thing that nobody can dispute, it's that Linus knows how to get shit done and knows how to run an effective team.
There's nothing stopping anyone from mounting a coup d'etat. Anyone can fork the kernel, build a team of developers and usurp Linus. They'll struggle to build that team, because Linus is deeply trusted with the stewardship of the kernel, in no small part because of his "unprofessional" behaviour.
This is the start of the thread. It is pretty obvious that no one is being serious about actual violence. It's just banter. Harmless (and not at all unhealty) banter.
The type of communication in the LKML has always been straight to the point and without unnecessary diplomacy. Sometimes it reads as assertiveness, sometimes it reads as rudeness. The point is that it works.
Every community has its "rules". Those rules are made by its members, all its members. If you disagree, act differently. If you are right and the others are wrong, they will follow you.
Asking for "professional behavior" when others are just acting normally is whining for politically correctness, which is pretty annoying and a sure way to not change anything.
The fact that the hacker community is full of mean gits is no coincidence. Let's consider where the opposite type of people (the ones who'll smile charmingly while stabbing you in the back) congregate - HR, PR, management, politics - all fields where creativity is less important than manipulativeness.
I'll take a brutally honest genius over a charming "socially intelligent" liar any day.
Linus is dead wrong here. When he says acting professionally means "fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords", he's attacking a straw man: none of that behaviour is professional, and to say that professional behaviour must degenerate to that behaviour is a stretch at best. Aggression is not warranted in a professional environment; neither overt (a…
Linus is dead wrong here. When he says acting professionally means "fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords", he's attacking a straw man: none of that behaviour is professional, and to say that professional behaviour must degenerate to that behaviour is a stretch at best. Aggression is not warranted in a professional environment; neither overt (a…
You've obviously never worked in an office, or you have taken a big step away from reality. The things Linus mentions are what happens as a result of supposed "professionalism". People are emotional, reactionary creatures with very different needs. These people are kernel developers, not 4 year olds. If they commit code that is fucking stupid, they should be called fucking stupid for it. As was shown on a recent post…
When has Linus actually worked in an office? Would he really know what it's like?
AFAIK, he moved from Finland to USA in 1998 to work at Transmeta. He was already famous at that time, and presumably could dictate his working terms. I recall reading an interview that suggested he was mostly working from home on the Linux kernel already back then.
Maybe that's why his notion that "professionalism" equals neckties and backstabbing seems like a caricature out of a '90s TV show.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You've obviously never worked in an office, or you have taken a big step away from reality. The things Linus mentions are what happens as a result of supposed "professionalism". People are emotional, reactionary creatures with very different needs. These people are kernel developers, not 4 year olds. If they commit code that is fucking stupid, they should be called fucking stupid for it. As was shown on a recent post…
Just a note. Once I worked at a tele provider and I accidentally messed up some contract and we lost $6000 - that was in a very professional working environment. I was called into the office of the manager and was told (not in a specifically pleasant way) how stupid my actions were. This taught me an important lesson about caring for details. In open source, the office is the mailing list. Life is tough. Say sorry an…
I'm guessing your co-workers knew you'd been chewed out but how much worse would you have felt (I guess plenty) and how much more would you have learned (I guess nothing) had your dressing down been in public?
Much of this isn't about some artificial standard for the sake of it, it's about getting the best out of people. Public beatings have been shown not to do that. If the OSS community wants to behave this way then it can but ultimately it's going to drive a bunch of people away, or cow them into not really speaking up for fear of retribution and as a result will likely miss out on valuable contributions.
There are tons of useful discussions that simply don't happen on HN because anybody with an actual strong opinion gets helbanned. For instance Google's Go language is lauded here because of fake politeness, but almost universally dismissed elsewhere.
This discussion has already achieved its real goal: to put "Linus Torvalds" and "Sarah" in the same sentence; this is the bullshit politics Linus talks about.