4 ms·

Linus is such a breath of fresh air. I'll take an honest, emotional, impossible to misconstrue, ass-chewing over the alternatives. Too often there's an avoidan

Linus is such a breath of fresh air. I'll take an honest, emotional, impossible to misconstrue, ass-chewing over the alternatives. Too often there's an avoidance of straightforward, blunt speech that conveys exactly what is meant. I really have better things to do than try to parse nonspecific beating-around-the-bush and deconstruct word-castles.

13of40 9y ago
I think a good leader could get the point across without resorting to bullying.
- otabdeveloper1 9y ago
  Your comment deserves a 4chan-style meme arrow: > getting an incompetent bozo fired > "bullying"
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  The guy does seem like he was shifting blame around.
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
    I think most people agree with you, he screwed up more with his handling of the situation. Occasional good faith mistakes shouldn’t get people in trouble, but he was weaseling. The interesting issue is more of leadership. 1) Is it possible to get equally direct and effective results in a different style? 2) Does Linus care about the answer to question (1), or would he act out of emotion even if he knew knew there was a equal or more productive way?
- ams6110 9y ago
  Nothing in TFA is bullying. Impolite, rude, brash yes.
- vorpalhex 9y ago
  I wouldn't call it bullying. He isn't attacking the committer personally or due to anything outside the issue. He isn't hounding the committer. Bluntly telling someone they really screwed up and need to stop denying it isn't bullying. Someone being mean isn't bullying.
  - WhitneyLand 9y ago
    Dressing someone down publicly, in a tone based on anger and frustration, is a form of humiliation, and humiliation is a form of bullying.
    - dmix 9y ago
      Brutal honesty isn't for everyone. I personally grew up with friends who would deal out this kind of thing and I wouldn't feel bullied or humiliated. Sometimes it got to you but, there's no way around that, but over time you learned to develop thicker skin and bounce back without getting feelings hurt. Especially when it's a personality style combined with the fact it comes from a place of caring deeply about the subject... then the motivation is not just trying to hurt the other person. This is the maturity, the point you learn to see in people. Clearly Linus is heavily attached to the project and the person he replied to has been pushing an unpopular position for 3 weeks. It didn't come out of nowhere. He's also not new to this game. He's not some new intern, who doesn't know the deal, getting bullied by a CEO. There has been a big culture trend to treat every small comment as potentially devastatingly hurtful, training kids to be thin skinned, and in my opinion, this highly disincentivizes honesty and will create a lot of inefficiency in business. As it requires a significant time investment to make sure even seemingly harmless statements are not 'hurtful', employing subtlety and skirting around an issue indirectly requires significant cognitive load. In a high volume, high pressure projects like the Linux mailing list this could really add up and generate bad decision making, as people will rather avoid an issue then invest in saying it carefully. The ROI in that trend is questionable, as you can train people to see beyond the words and look at the person's real motivation and meaning, as it is not a given raw honesty is coming from a place of personal attack. That said, obviously otherwise real hurtful and mean attacks, without an underlying purpose and genuine motivation other than to hurt the person, should never be tolerated. But sacrificing full honesty and non-heavily filtered emotional opinions in order to never have these personal attacks is just not worth it IMO.
opmac 9y ago
"At least he tells it like it is" right? Forget that he's an asshole about it. Pretty much the same reason everybody voted for Trump.
- benburleson 9y ago
  Except Linus is technically right, where Trump is normally technically wrong, and an asshole.
  - opmac 9y ago
    I agree with you, but without getting too political, the people who voted for Trump most likely think he's technically correct as well.
- musage 9y ago
  > Pretty much the same reason everybody voted for Trump. "Everybody"? Sanders also said a bunch of things like they are, and he said them politely. Especially factoring in grass roots support, he was more popular than Hillary and would have wiped the floor with Trump. If you allow your media and "leaders" to sweep people like Sanders under the rug, you make people like Trump inevitable. And then you still don't learn. There can be worse things than Trump, so much infinitely worse; and they will come to pass if you insist on this trajectory.
  - opmac 9y ago
    Bernie didn't win. More people voted for Trump than Bernie. One was an asshole, the other wasn't. > Especially factoring in grass roots support, he was more popular than Hillary If that is objectively true, he should have won the primary. He didn't. > and would have wiped the floor with Trump. [CITATION NEEDED] > If you allow > And then you still don't learn > if you insist Why are you calling me out? I didn't vote for him. Go project somewhere else.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      Bernie didn't get a chance because "everyone" had already decided to go with the "gender issue"...
bluejekyll 9y ago
The emotion definitely shows how angry he is, but it is possible to express yourself without getting angry; to be clear, concise, and impossible to misconstrue. Ass-chewing isn't generally beneficial as it makes people defensive and potentially angry themselves. The mea culpa is good: "And again sorry, I screwed up, it should not have happened, my perspective was incorrect and I know I need to make it right." This is a great response, defuses the conversation and makes it clear that it's going to be fixed. As someone who's gotten chewed out before, all it does is leave a bad taste in your mouth and most likely going to quit the company or possibly the project. Honestly, the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.
- golergka 9y ago
  > As someone who's gotten chewed out before, all it does is leave a bad taste in your mouth and most likely going to quit the company or possibly the project. That seems to be his direct intent, and being angry does help get this point across.
  - bluejekyll 9y ago
    I don’t think that’s really what Linus wants (obviously we’re speculating here). He was trying to make it clear that breaking the first rule of kernel development is not negotiable. Anger and swearing isn’t needed to express that, let me reiterate, this is what does that: > the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.
    - digi_owl 9y ago
      His old line about it goes something like this: When online, people can't tell when you're being subtle.
WhitneyLand 9y ago
Your comment shows the downside of assholes being effective. People so often have to deal with ineffectiveness, they come to feel happy with anything they can get that works, forgetting that’s it almost always possible to be just as direct, blunt, and compelling with different rhetoric. Assholism is not the solution to great leadership. It’s one of many techniques leaders use. Some leaders are effective using it frequently, but it’s important to note it’s usually not required because there are trade offs and downsides, both morally and amorally from a pure efficiency standpoint.
forgottenpass 9y ago
There are people who have the mental tools for being in a conversation where someone displays anger and aggression [0], and those who don't. One person's world-endingly stressful and uncomfortable interaction is another's colorful productive disagreement. The people who don't have those tools control the horizontal, they control the vertical too. If they say your personality is wrong by definition, who are you to question them? Without getting snarky, that's just the status quo right now. In some number of years they'll treat it like a big discovery that their previous assessment of all social interaction wasn't 100% perfect. Let's just hope that when it comes the pendulum swings our way and I get to stop wearing an emotionally-dishonest husk of a personality to the office. [0] For the sake of avoiding predictable tangents, I mean aggression that is obviously not going to escalate to physical responses, or even anything more than rejecting patches.
- megaman22 9y ago
  For me, it is really the circuitousness that people will go through to avoid saying anything that might be taken as damaging to somebody's feels. It's exhausting, and confusing, and I wish people would just cut the shit and say what they mean. But my dad was ex-military, then a logging contractor, then a heavy equipment mechanic, and I grew up working with him. When there are firearms, chainsaws, bulldozers, or heavy objects dangling from cranes, you don't have the luxury of couching your criticism in weasel-words or crafting the compliment-criticism sandwich. If somebody is fucking up, you let them know in no uncertain terms, because somebody could get hurt.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Also, it is quite likely that Torvalds would not word it like this in person. He uses it on the mailing list specifically because the written form do not allow body language and other such clues. It is this that gave us things like smilies and Poe's Law.

13of40 9y ago

I think a good leader could get the point across without resorting to bullying.

otabdeveloper1 9y ago
Your comment deserves a 4chan-style meme arrow: > getting an incompetent bozo fired > "bullying"
adamnemecek 9y ago
The guy does seem like he was shifting blame around.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  I think most people agree with you, he screwed up more with his handling of the situation. Occasional good faith mistakes shouldn’t get people in trouble, but he was weaseling. The interesting issue is more of leadership. 1) Is it possible to get equally direct and effective results in a different style? 2) Does Linus care about the answer to question (1), or would he act out of emotion even if he knew knew there was a equal or more productive way?
ams6110 9y ago
Nothing in TFA is bullying. Impolite, rude, brash yes.
vorpalhex 9y ago
I wouldn't call it bullying. He isn't attacking the committer personally or due to anything outside the issue. He isn't hounding the committer. Bluntly telling someone they really screwed up and need to stop denying it isn't bullying. Someone being mean isn't bullying.
- WhitneyLand 9y ago
  Dressing someone down publicly, in a tone based on anger and frustration, is a form of humiliation, and humiliation is a form of bullying.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Brutal honesty isn't for everyone. I personally grew up with friends who would deal out this kind of thing and I wouldn't feel bullied or humiliated. Sometimes it got to you but, there's no way around that, but over time you learned to develop thicker skin and bounce back without getting feelings hurt. Especially when it's a personality style combined with the fact it comes from a place of caring deeply about the subject... then the motivation is not just trying to hurt the other person. This is the maturity, the point you learn to see in people. Clearly Linus is heavily attached to the project and the person he replied to has been pushing an unpopular position for 3 weeks. It didn't come out of nowhere. He's also not new to this game. He's not some new intern, who doesn't know the deal, getting bullied by a CEO. There has been a big culture trend to treat every small comment as potentially devastatingly hurtful, training kids to be thin skinned, and in my opinion, this highly disincentivizes honesty and will create a lot of inefficiency in business. As it requires a significant time investment to make sure even seemingly harmless statements are not 'hurtful', employing subtlety and skirting around an issue indirectly requires significant cognitive load. In a high volume, high pressure projects like the Linux mailing list this could really add up and generate bad decision making, as people will rather avoid an issue then invest in saying it carefully. The ROI in that trend is questionable, as you can train people to see beyond the words and look at the person's real motivation and meaning, as it is not a given raw honesty is coming from a place of personal attack. That said, obviously otherwise real hurtful and mean attacks, without an underlying purpose and genuine motivation other than to hurt the person, should never be tolerated. But sacrificing full honesty and non-heavily filtered emotional opinions in order to never have these personal attacks is just not worth it IMO.

opmac 9y ago

"At least he tells it like it is" right? Forget that he's an asshole about it. Pretty much the same reason everybody voted for Trump.

benburleson 9y ago
Except Linus is technically right, where Trump is normally technically wrong, and an asshole.
- opmac 9y ago
  I agree with you, but without getting too political, the people who voted for Trump most likely think he's technically correct as well.
musage 9y ago
> Pretty much the same reason everybody voted for Trump. "Everybody"? Sanders also said a bunch of things like they are, and he said them politely. Especially factoring in grass roots support, he was more popular than Hillary and would have wiped the floor with Trump. If you allow your media and "leaders" to sweep people like Sanders under the rug, you make people like Trump inevitable. And then you still don't learn. There can be worse things than Trump, so much infinitely worse; and they will come to pass if you insist on this trajectory.
- opmac 9y ago
  Bernie didn't win. More people voted for Trump than Bernie. One was an asshole, the other wasn't. > Especially factoring in grass roots support, he was more popular than Hillary If that is objectively true, he should have won the primary. He didn't. > and would have wiped the floor with Trump. [CITATION NEEDED] > If you allow > And then you still don't learn > if you insist Why are you calling me out? I didn't vote for him. Go project somewhere else.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    Bernie didn't get a chance because "everyone" had already decided to go with the "gender issue"...

bluejekyll 9y ago

The emotion definitely shows how angry he is, but it is possible to express yourself without getting angry; to be clear, concise, and impossible to misconstrue. Ass-chewing isn't generally beneficial as it makes people defensive and potentially angry themselves. The mea culpa is good: "And again sorry, I screwed up, it should not have happened, my perspective was incorrect and I know I need to make it right." This is a great response, defuses the conversation and makes it clear that it's going to be fixed. As someone who's gotten chewed out before, all it does is leave a bad taste in your mouth and most likely going to quit the company or possibly the project. Honestly, the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.

golergka 9y ago
> As someone who's gotten chewed out before, all it does is leave a bad taste in your mouth and most likely going to quit the company or possibly the project. That seems to be his direct intent, and being angry does help get this point across.
- bluejekyll 9y ago
  I don’t think that’s really what Linus wants (obviously we’re speculating here). He was trying to make it clear that breaking the first rule of kernel development is not negotiable. Anger and swearing isn’t needed to express that, let me reiterate, this is what does that: > the threat of rejecting future commits and/or rejecting his opinions was by far the best thing in Linus' response, b/c those cut straight to your potential to contribute to the project.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    His old line about it goes something like this: When online, people can't tell when you're being subtle.

WhitneyLand 9y ago

Your comment shows the downside of assholes being effective. People so often have to deal with ineffectiveness, they come to feel happy with anything they can get that works, forgetting that’s it almost always possible to be just as direct, blunt, and compelling with different rhetoric. Assholism is not the solution to great leadership. It’s one of many techniques leaders use. Some leaders are effective using it frequently, but it’s important to note it’s usually not required because there are trade offs and downsides, both morally and amorally from a pure efficiency standpoint.

forgottenpass 9y ago

There are people who have the mental tools for being in a conversation where someone displays anger and aggression [0], and those who don't. One person's world-endingly stressful and uncomfortable interaction is another's colorful productive disagreement. The people who don't have those tools control the horizontal, they control the vertical too. If they say your personality is wrong by definition, who are you to question them? Without getting snarky, that's just the status quo right now. In some number of years they'll treat it like a big discovery that their previous assessment of all social interaction wasn't 100% perfect. Let's just hope that when it comes the pendulum swings our way and I get to stop wearing an emotionally-dishonest husk of a personality to the office. [0] For the sake of avoiding predictable tangents, I mean aggression that is obviously not going to escalate to physical responses, or even anything more than rejecting patches.

megaman22 9y ago
For me, it is really the circuitousness that people will go through to avoid saying anything that might be taken as damaging to somebody's feels. It's exhausting, and confusing, and I wish people would just cut the shit and say what they mean. But my dad was ex-military, then a logging contractor, then a heavy equipment mechanic, and I grew up working with him. When there are firearms, chainsaws, bulldozers, or heavy objects dangling from cranes, you don't have the luxury of couching your criticism in weasel-words or crafting the compliment-criticism sandwich. If somebody is fucking up, you let them know in no uncertain terms, because somebody could get hurt.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Also, it is quite likely that Torvalds would not word it like this in person. He uses it on the mailing list specifically because the written form do not allow body language and other such clues. It is this that gave us things like smilies and Poe's Law.