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Linus on "acting professionally"

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Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#421

Post by olalonde »

metaphorm wrote: post #281
jakobe wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not mean to call Torvalds names. Apparently I wasn't careful enough in my wording. I meant to express my frustration how the community often accepts socially inacceptable behaviour from accomplished people. When "normal" people fall into a rage, we tell them to learn coping with their anger. If they keep yelling angrily at people, we might even suggest they see a psychiatrist. Not as an insult, but because we s…

you just don't get it. you're still stuck on the notion of "socially inacceptable behaviour". the whole point here is that the standard by which you judge "socially acceptable" is broken and detrimental to the community. Linus behavior is socially acceptable. He is honest, passionate, says what he means, and most importantly, he is forgiving and doesn't hold grudges. The type of behavior that Linus is railing against…

This is a false dichotomy.

There's a happy middle ground between being rude and playing insipid office politics. It's called politeness and doesn't have to make communications less effective or less honest.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#422

Post by subsection1h »

nknighthb wrote: post #80
Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important difference is that the mailing list is public, your humbling was private. 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 be…

I much prefer being publicly berated. There's no question of what was said, and there is pressure on the one doing the berating to get it right and not be unreasonable in their expectations. It further urges consistency -- if one person is dressed down for doing X in Y circumstances, failure to do the same to the next person who makes the same error will either reveal obvious bias, or make clear that the original ber…

    I much prefer being publicly berated.
Okay, then add your real name to your Hacker News account so we can publicly berate you more effectively. :-)

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#423

Post by theorique »

jasonwocky wrote: post #367
theorique wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linus gets away with it because he's Linus and people are willing to swim through a river of shit to work closely with him. Conversely, an average OSS developer will drive people away with this attitude unless the benefit of working with him is so attractive that it outweighs the pain of abuse (in which case he's probably not 'average' at all). Assholes who really deliver get a pass from (some of) the world. Doesn't…

Linus wasn't always "Linus". It'd be interesting to graph his profanity / other communication metrics over time.

Agreed. I suspect he was always an easily-frustrated, OCD, crabby hacker.

And those aspects of his personality would be exaggerated by the level of communication and questions and input that he's come to receive over the years.

Doesn't make it 'right', or 'kind', but I suppose it gets things done.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#424

Post by nknighthb »

Tyrannosaurs wrote: post #402
nknighthb wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Research shows that you're not typical - most people find it massively demotivating What is "it", exactly? Any public criticism? Public belittling (which is severely different from a proper dressing down)? Swearing? There's a lot mixed in here. And does research conclusively establish a significantly different reaction to otherwise identical acts in public vs private? > I'd rather go with programmers behave broadly…

"It" was referring to being publicly berated from your reply. Berating is angry criticism so I think it's fairly specific. Ultimately it depends on what you're trying to achieve when you're talking to someone. There might be occasions when being shamed in front of the team is the best thing for the person but I'd suggest that they're few and far between. As a manager if I act angrily towards you then regardless of wh…

I trust no one to be unbiased and fair at all times. I trust no one to be conscious of their own prejudices. I trust no one to be omniscient or infallible or to have even a reasonably accurate memory of past events. And I particularly distrust them in these matters when they are angry. These individual failings cannot be wholly eradicated from anyone, but they can be compensated for by the involvement of the team.

You can't even trust yourself. You've "lost your temper" twice. Why won't you do it a third time? A fourth? A fifth?

Does it not occur to you that this is all just part of being human?

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#425

Post by jdbernard »

jakobe wrote: post #196
vacri wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Torvalds is not 'falling into a rage', he's venting, and doing it in a controlled manner, as a ton of people do. He also doesn't 'keep yelling angrily' - it only appears that way because the only comments of his that get publicised are the fruity ones. I remember one of this 'Linus Swore!' threads on HN a while back, linking to a comment of Torvalds' that had little in it but anger... presented out of context. I went…

You are right, I don't know much about Torvalds. He might be a very patient person most of his life. Like any public figure, he is probably badly misrepresented on the web. But what makes me sad is that when he does snap, there's a large number of people who come and justify his behaviour. People don't say "You are misrepresenting him!". People say "He gave so much to us. He has the right to behave this way."

A lot of people use the "he's given so much" defense as a reaction to how widely it seems to be published out of context. This seems especially when they appreciate the culture that created the kernel but have not been following the discussion themselves. There is some feeling that this painfully honest abrasiveness is part of what makes the whole distributed contribution culture work so well and that if we do not defend this uniqueness it will give way to the same watered-down politics you find in so many corporate and even open source projects. Which is kind of silly because Linus isn't going to change. He has made that much clear.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#426

Post by DanBC »

kfcm wrote: post #420

"Profanity is the language common to all programmers". This entire thing is the clash of two cultures: corporatism (and its drive to mediocrity/milquetoasts) vs "getting sh*t done right"-ism. It all comes down to this: do you value political sensitivity, or calling a spade a spade (granted, profanity isn't required for this, but it certainly helps)? Give me the latter any day. I'm an adult; I can handle it.

> This entire thing is the clash of two cultures: corporatism (and its drive to mediocrity/milquetoasts) vs "getting sh*t done right"-ism.

a) You're a stupid cunt if you think that's the fucking argument. Your comprehension sucks. Don't bother responding if you come up with retarded shit like this. Idiot.

b) No, the people asking for an end to viciousness are not asking for "politically correct" over-polite speech. You can call a spade a spade. You can call broken code broken. What you shouldn't do is call a spade a fucking useless spade. You shouldn't call the spade-user a clueless fuckwit. This is also not about "getting shit done". Starting a flamewar distracts people from the actual job, and makes people less, not more, efficient.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#427

Post by Confusion »

Nrsolis wrote: post #31
ealexhudson wrote: post #11

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…

The real danger here is that once you've developed the habit of berating people who screw up, you'll continue to do it when it's not really called for. I'm no shrinking violet. I got a good ass-chewing from time to time in the Navy and each time I deserved it. That said, you'd be surprised to hear that ass-chewing doesn't happen NEARLY as often as you'd expect it to in a hyper-aggressive life-or-death type world like…

  The real danger here is that once you've developed the 
  habit of berating people who screw up, you'll continue to 
  do it when it's not really called for.
Which has already happened to Linus numerous times.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#428

Post by darkarmani »

riggins wrote: post #395
mpyne wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Words are just words. They merely convey the message. But the message itself can be harmful. Psychological abuse is just as real to the brain as physical abuse is to the skin and muscle beneath. If messages meant nothing then there would be no reason to talk about hate speech, sexually abusive speech, or the many, many other harmful messages people can and do convey to others. It's not my job to build an impenetrable…

we'll have to agree to disagree. The fundamental claim that I simply don't accept is that people can't handle words. I disagree. People have the capacity to handle anything that is said to them. Psychological abuse is just as real to the brain as physical abuse is to the skin and muscle beneath. a. I'm skeptical of this claim. Would like to see your source b. Only to the extent you allow it. That's one of the definin…

> People have the capacity to handle anything that is said to them...I can actually say to myself 'pull it together, words are meaningless' or 'this guy is an ignorant, why would I care what he says'.

If words are meaningless why would saying anything to yourself change your state? It sounds like you are saying that you can use your own words to yourself to combat the harm of someone's words. That's very much different than saying that words have no meaning.

In fact, you are saying that people's words impose a cost on you. The fact that people have "capacity" to handle things said to them means a resource is being used.

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#429

Post by theorique »

dominotw wrote: post #366
columbo wrote: post #200

This is another great example of why you can't take successful people and distil them down to their base components and say "ah, this is what made him great!" I believe being a loud-abrasive-dictator works for Linus because he is famous for being a loud-abrasive-dictator. That's not important. What is important is the reader. Let's be clear on a few things #1 - Linus doesn't run a business. He's the kernel admin, he'…

So basically you can be a dick as long as you can get away with it.

Well, you can do anything you want. There may be consequences, of course.

Perhaps a backlash from disgruntled developers may be one of the consequences of Linus's behavior?

Re: Linus on "acting professionally"

#430

Post by CrLf »

jvdh wrote: post #391
CrLf wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's debatable that it actually scares anyone off... This is not about grinding newcomers to the LKML, this is about the type of communication between people that have known each other for quite some time, and are well aware of each other's technical "sensibilities". True, the LKML is also known to be a bit harsh to newcomers. But only in a sense that newcomers are often unaware of the high technical standards th…

I would not want to work in an environment where mistakes are punished by a shouting tyrant. Even if I know I should not make those mistakes. It does not matter that he does this to people he knows well and perhaps can even handle this kind of verbal abuse. He does this publicly to the entire world which is not acceptable in my book.

Being blunt and talking hard over email does not a shouting tyrant make.
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