Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off

I'm more generalizing stuff our industry is bad at accepting because we all know a brilliant asshole who can appear to be nice but is locked and loaded ready to burn you at the slightest whim. In fact, i'd wager that the most difficult people to work with are the ones that can be nice at times because their unpredictability just ads to the confusion & chaos. The worst is if/when they do apologize but don't follow that up with action - i'm thrilled to see Linus committing to action!

For instance, Bob is just starting out as a junior dev. He gets pulled in by Carl. Carl is project lead and everyone admires him. Carl is smart, quick, and insightful. He's seen as a bit of a hard-ass, but he's never wrong. He cuts through bullshit. So he pulls Bob in. And he tells Bob, "I've reviewed your last commit, and here are problems X, Y, and Z with it. X causes this. Y is deprecated and B is how we should be handling the issue now. Z gives the wrong result for this set of cases."

And Bob leaves and Bob feels bad. He feels just reamed. Seemed like nothing he did was right. So he gets this impression in his head that Carl really laid into him. Fast forward 10 years and Bob is now a project lead and he wants to emulate Carl. Because despite how hard Carl was, Bob learned a lot. He's a lot better than he was back then. Now, he doesn't think he'll ever be Carl, but he's still good.

And Bob is reviewing Dave's code, and Dave's code is just as bad as Bob's was 10 years ago. So Bob calls in Dave. And he lays into Dave, "Just what the fuck do they teach in school now? Look at what you did here. You fucked it up. Don't you know about A? Or B? You have to do better."

And Bob feels good, he gave a "Carl"-style rant and now Dave will get better.

But reread how each approached their junior. Carl didn't attack Bob at all. He focused on the code itself. Bob internalized the criticisms of the code and took it personally. So when it was Bob's turn to criticize, he made it personal. Of all the lessons he was given that day, he missed the most important one.

So, you see "This commit is bad because of [X]" as polite, because you aren't the type to internalize criticism of work as criticism of you. People who do internalize it, see it as one and the same and feel that comment as "brilliant asshole".

The kind of brilliant asshole you describe, aka Bob, hangs on a bit longer because he's not bad at his core job, it's just that he has a tendency to handle people poorly.

In some cultures, direct comment on an idea is the norm, but in others it might be very rude. Even engaging in what you might find to be polite critique can be a challenge; even the most well intentioned comments might not transit cultural boundaries unscathed.

Worse, there might be some context you're missing that causes you to trigger someone without any intent to cause offense.

Example:

A new, senior developer transfers to my team. He puts up a CR and asks me for review. As I comb through it, I find a couple small bugs and take the time to explain why they are bugs, thinking perhaps he did not understand a subtlety in a library we are using. This same library has tripped up a number of developers on occasion, as there is a state that is being manipulated, but under certain circumstances it can be put in a state that is not intended. It's part of a language standard library and not something we can wrap in a safer way, sadly.

He apparently knew about it but just didn't account for it, and he took my explanation to be very patronizing and condescending, given that he already knew the problem. He then read into the rest of the review a hidden malice.

This is partly my fault; perhaps I didn't need to fully explain how the function works, though with the misuse I thought it could be a chance to teach. I probably should have taken more care in some of my verbiage; I tend to be somewhat direct, which comes across stronger than I intend it to. Not "You're a moron, delete this bad code" but more "This function call will not do X, Y, and Z. It will do W instead. Why not use ABC instead?"