23 ms·

As someone familiar with LBT's mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I'm guessing a big part of what's happening here is that LBT hasn't changed the way h

by wyclif 8y ago

As someone familiar with LBT's mailing list rhetoric since the early days, I'm guessing a big part of what's happening here is that LBT hasn't changed the way he communicates but the rest of the world has moved on. And let's face it, the engineering and programming world has gotten a lot more politically correct—I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. What I mean is that it's getting less and less acceptable in tech to make excuses for abusing people either verbally or in writing. Back when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were excused for using harsh criticism and vituperation at work. Many people, I think, will be glad that sort of culture is going away.

GW150914 8y ago
I don’t think it has anything to do with so-called PC or women, it’s just unprofessional behavior and tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. Tech grew up, became a profession, and perforce people involved have had to grow up too. It has literally nothing to do with the usual culture war bullshit that gets paraded around. It’s sort of tragic that some people have so little experience in the real world beyond the tech bubble that they think basic standards of decorum and professionalism are gendered.
- wyclif 8y ago
  That doesn't sound plausible to me. Tech has been "grown up" in terms of professionalism for a long time. What didn't catch up was emotional intelligence and workplace ethos. What is new is that people aren't going to tolerate Linus ranting at them and their colleagues and cussing them out anymore like in the old days. And I'm sticking to my guns, thinking that a lot of this has to do with a more diverse workplace (and the pressure doesn't have to come from the LKML, but from the larger software engineering ethos). Linus is a very smart guy, and I'm glad he's accepted that he needs to change. He should be lauded for that.
- xor1 8y ago
  Tech has been a profession longer than you or I have been alive.
  - GW150914 8y ago
    First of all I opened with, tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. The scale has dwarfed essentially everything except finance. Second, when I look around at major professions, I see standards of practice and organizations to enforce them. There is no functional AMA of tech, and it shows in every janky IoT product, dishonest and borderline illegal privacy invasion or growth hack, and MVP that forgot the V. If you want the respect, you need more than just money, you need accountability. In Linus’ case he’s lesrning that in the real world it is (as he said) unprofessional to suggest that a colleague should be aborted. Imo of course.
antirez 8y ago
Not sure if this is the case because Linus always appeared to go over the limit even to the most old style, cold and technology focused engineers. You may not get into the empathy thing and yet be able to avoid replying in certain wrong ways, keeping the reply focused on the technical points, without attacking the human being and so forth. Moreover to be honest I don't even think that the way he used to handle it guaranteed the best technological outcome too, since some soft touch is needed in order to spur people to do their best.
chickenfries 8y ago
Men deserve to be treated with respect too. I'm a man, and I would absolutely quit any job where someone talked to me the way LBT did in his emails. I'm sure someone reading this thinks that makes me a snowflake.
- wyclif 8y ago
  Hey, I agree totally. I wasn't suggesting that respect and empathy are only for women, they're for everybody.
  - chickenfries 8y ago
    Sorry, I guess I read your comment uncharitably at first, but I do know there are people who do think that the workplace where we are free to behave in an agressive, insulting ways is the ideal workplace, in 2018.
buboard 8y ago
> is the increasing presence of women in technology. you have statistics on that? if anything it has been declining during the entirety of Linux's existence https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_6955940.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_69...
JumpCrisscross 8y ago
> when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were expected to be able to bear harsh criticism and vituperation I don’t you intended this, but at first read your comment comes across as sexist. It implies men could take the heat while women can’t. More than being offensive, I find it untrue. Anger-driven management doesn’t scale. Tech has scales, and its heroes of yore much brave a bigger world than they were originally used to.
- wyclif 8y ago
  I didn't intend that. What I'm implying is that "men taking the heat" and having supposedly thicker skin was the excuse used to justify the lack of empathy and sociopathic behaviour in the culture.
kryptiskt 8y ago
If you look at the tech world of the 80s, 90% of it was very buttoned-up and proper, despite being male-dominated. The rudeness comes from Linux' roots in a youth-dominated hacker subculture. It just doesn't work very well when they aren't teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream and are working at it in a professional capacity.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > It just doesn't work very well when they aren't teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream What has gone mainstream is in my opinion something very different than what the original hacker ethos was about. See for example https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacke...
- ploxiln 8y ago
  Or has that "hacker subculture" actually worked AMAZINGLY BETTER THAN ALL THE CORPORATE CRAP OUT THERE. Corporate/Professional: Symantec, Microsoft Rude/Hacker: Linux, OpenBSD
tomohawk 8y ago
Men and women express aggression in different ways. While they can both be toxic, female aggression is more acceptable at this time. Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad. Be critical all you want, but his achievement is amazing.
- Mtinie 8y ago
  > Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad. It may have started this way when he began one of his emails, but even he admits the attacks often went from “let me critique your contribution” to “here’s why your contribution sucks and beyond that here’s why I think you suck as a contributor”.
  - SamReidHughes 8y ago
    Being all patronizing and snooty about somebody making a total noob of themselves can be a lot worse!
    - Mtinie 8y ago
      I’m not sure I follow. You can absolutely be critical of the idea and the implementation, without being patronizing.
      - SamReidHughes 8y ago
        You also often need to tell people they need to improve themselves. To criticize the person, not just the code.
- dralley 8y ago
  I think this is understating it bit. He did mostly focus on technical aspects, but he did also occasionally say things like "whoever wrote this should be retroactively aborted", which is going waaaaaay too far and is going to make someone feel bad, period.
Mtinie 8y ago
> [...]I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. I don’t agree. I find situations like these stem from the number of qualified developers interacting within these communities. In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. The only way to move the needle forward was to grin and bear it. Today, we have a greater density of talent with the diverse skills needed to contribute to these core projects. Caustic personalities aren’t worth dealing with any longer when you have a bunch of non-assholes you can rely on. Don’t be a dick, do your job without being abusive, and if the community you’ve been trying to contribute to finds you to be boorish and not worth the effort to engage with, adapt—as Linus is going to try to do.
- wolfgke 8y ago
  > In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. [...] Today, we have a greater density of talent I do not believe that the density of challenged. What has changed is that modern programming languages/technologies/... require much less talent to do something useful with. So a lot more people can (perhaps) do a meaningful contribution to the project. This makes much more projects possible. But it does not lead to the situation that more people can now contribute to projects of hard difficulty.
beguiledfoil 8y ago
I don't think it has anything to do with PC and has a lot to do with being C. There's a lot of bravado among older programmers that carries over from a time when they really could do whatever they wanted because stuff needed to get done and a principled, lone gunman solution could actually be a much closer approximation of correct than some BS consensus built monster. That simply isn't the world we work in anymore. Everything has been done and if it's being done again it's because the subtle mistakes and approximations of the past aren't good enough. Linus' complaints about the scheduler are the best example of what I'm talking about. A scheduler is a super hard problem now and there's a lot of complexity to wrestle with that simply didn't exist in 2001. Anyway, the kernel is still open and discussion is still happening so I don't think we're in some kind of crisis. Good for Linus to take time off - maybe this will be an opportunity to develop processes that can create a more dynamic open source environment, one less reliant on a few individuals.
yosito 8y ago
I agree. While I think it's good that he's trying to take more responsibility for his abrasiveness, and would have been good even decades ago, I think society is shifting (for the better) in a direction where it's much less acceptable to be abrasive. As an abrasive person myself, who's easily frustrated, but has a thick skin when it comes to other people being abrasive with me, I don't personally care if the world gets more polite or sensitive. But I also recognize that not everyone is as comfortable with roughness as I am, and the world will be a better place if everyone learns to be respectful and sensitive to the needs of others.
golemiprague 8y ago
I don't see so many women programmers, I see a lot of women hovering around in other roles but I don't think men should change their behaviour just because of that, manly behaviour is what created the huge success of the tech industry. I am also not a fan of being rude but being direct and clear is not such a problem and we shouldn't stop it and tiptoe around women just because they are women.
Nelson69 8y ago
Linking it to "PC" or "women" I think sort of undermines it on a larger level. To take part in opensource, especially a big project like Linux you have to be willing to put yourself out there a little bit. You have to put in some work, and then put something out there to possibly (probably?) be crapped on by people you respect. They might love it and merge it, they might hate it and tell you why, they might come back somewhere in the middle with a list of things to change that you may or may not agree with. They might ask you questions you can't answer, they might point things out that make you feel really silly. That element of risk is something many computer people have a hard time with, not just women or minorities. I got involved with the kernel a long while back, sent in a couple smallish things. Then I found what seemed like plutonium, the embedded project I was working on, we were literally spending like 1/3 or our cycles zeroing pages. Did some stuff to use MMX like instructions to do it and got a nice little bump. Turned if off entirely and got a huge bump. I/O took off like a rocket, all sorts of things got noticeably faster; like we were able to double what our project had to do. I had a more senior Linux guy coaching me up on this, a made man in the community, it was late one night when we discovered this so I put together some patches and sent if off to Linus, he was encouraging it. Linus was quiet for about a day and then sent back some pointed observations and was kind of making fun of me. Zeroing newly allocated pages is kind of important, it's a security risk to not do it and it happens for a reason. I felt like a total newb, and Linus had poked fun at me in an email, it didn't feel good. The made guy I was working with sort of picked me up, told me he does that to everybody and that it's good natured ribbing for the most part but before that I had just felt like crap. This guy I respect the hell out of was making fun of my contribution, I got over it pretty easily but I could easily see how others might not. There have been some fairly popular contributors (or maybe not, I don't know..) over the years that have basically managed their own forks with various patches (Con Kolivas' scheduler stuff stands out to me) because for whatever reasons they couldn't or wouldn't get stuff merged or accepted, even though it seemed to be really useful and appealing to a lot of others. In the heat of it all, it can seem really arbitrary too, you put some code together, you know it solves some problems and the community of developers doesn't want it or won't take it. Not sure what caused Linus to recognize it this time but I hope things improve, it's better for everyone.
- 8y ago
blt 8y ago
False. "The percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since" [1]. Women do not have an increasing presence in terms of population. Maybe the real phenomenon is that women are no longer accepting the culture that tends to form in male-dominated fields. [1] http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code%3A-why-aren-t-more-women-majoring-in-computer-science http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code%3A-why-ar...

by wyclif 8y ago

GW150914 8y ago

I don’t think it has anything to do with so-called PC or women, it’s just unprofessional behavior and tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. Tech grew up, became a profession, and perforce people involved have had to grow up too. It has literally nothing to do with the usual culture war bullshit that gets paraded around. It’s sort of tragic that some people have so little experience in the real world beyond the tech bubble that they think basic standards of decorum and professionalism are gendered.

wyclif 8y ago
That doesn't sound plausible to me. Tech has been "grown up" in terms of professionalism for a long time. What didn't catch up was emotional intelligence and workplace ethos. What is new is that people aren't going to tolerate Linus ranting at them and their colleagues and cussing them out anymore like in the old days. And I'm sticking to my guns, thinking that a lot of this has to do with a more diverse workplace (and the pressure doesn't have to come from the LKML, but from the larger software engineering ethos). Linus is a very smart guy, and I'm glad he's accepted that he needs to change. He should be lauded for that.
xor1 8y ago
Tech has been a profession longer than you or I have been alive.
- GW150914 8y ago
  First of all I opened with, tech has gone from people in a garage to the leaders on the market in that same time. The scale has dwarfed essentially everything except finance. Second, when I look around at major professions, I see standards of practice and organizations to enforce them. There is no functional AMA of tech, and it shows in every janky IoT product, dishonest and borderline illegal privacy invasion or growth hack, and MVP that forgot the V. If you want the respect, you need more than just money, you need accountability. In Linus’ case he’s lesrning that in the real world it is (as he said) unprofessional to suggest that a colleague should be aborted. Imo of course.

antirez 8y ago

Not sure if this is the case because Linus always appeared to go over the limit even to the most old style, cold and technology focused engineers. You may not get into the empathy thing and yet be able to avoid replying in certain wrong ways, keeping the reply focused on the technical points, without attacking the human being and so forth. Moreover to be honest I don't even think that the way he used to handle it guaranteed the best technological outcome too, since some soft touch is needed in order to spur people to do their best.

chickenfries 8y ago

Men deserve to be treated with respect too. I'm a man, and I would absolutely quit any job where someone talked to me the way LBT did in his emails. I'm sure someone reading this thinks that makes me a snowflake.

wyclif 8y ago
Hey, I agree totally. I wasn't suggesting that respect and empathy are only for women, they're for everybody.
- chickenfries 8y ago
  Sorry, I guess I read your comment uncharitably at first, but I do know there are people who do think that the workplace where we are free to behave in an agressive, insulting ways is the ideal workplace, in 2018.

buboard 8y ago

> is the increasing presence of women in technology. you have statistics on that? if anything it has been declining during the entirety of Linux's existence https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_6955940.html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/27/women-in-tech_n_69...

JumpCrisscross 8y ago

> when engineering was almost totally male-dominated, you were expected to be able to bear harsh criticism and vituperation I don’t you intended this, but at first read your comment comes across as sexist. It implies men could take the heat while women can’t. More than being offensive, I find it untrue. Anger-driven management doesn’t scale. Tech has scales, and its heroes of yore much brave a bigger world than they were originally used to.

wyclif 8y ago
I didn't intend that. What I'm implying is that "men taking the heat" and having supposedly thicker skin was the excuse used to justify the lack of empathy and sociopathic behaviour in the culture.

kryptiskt 8y ago

If you look at the tech world of the 80s, 90% of it was very buttoned-up and proper, despite being male-dominated. The rudeness comes from Linux' roots in a youth-dominated hacker subculture. It just doesn't work very well when they aren't teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream and are working at it in a professional capacity.

wolfgke 8y ago
> It just doesn't work very well when they aren't teenage hackers anymore, but have gone mainstream What has gone mainstream is in my opinion something very different than what the original hacker ethos was about. See for example https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacker-ethos https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacke...
ploxiln 8y ago
Or has that "hacker subculture" actually worked AMAZINGLY BETTER THAN ALL THE CORPORATE CRAP OUT THERE. Corporate/Professional: Symantec, Microsoft Rude/Hacker: Linux, OpenBSD

tomohawk 8y ago

Men and women express aggression in different ways. While they can both be toxic, female aggression is more acceptable at this time. Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad. Be critical all you want, but his achievement is amazing.

Mtinie 8y ago
> Linus was forceful at times, but his focus was on the work, not on trying to make people feel bad. It may have started this way when he began one of his emails, but even he admits the attacks often went from “let me critique your contribution” to “here’s why your contribution sucks and beyond that here’s why I think you suck as a contributor”.
- SamReidHughes 8y ago
  Being all patronizing and snooty about somebody making a total noob of themselves can be a lot worse!
  - Mtinie 8y ago
    I’m not sure I follow. You can absolutely be critical of the idea and the implementation, without being patronizing.
    - SamReidHughes 8y ago
      You also often need to tell people they need to improve themselves. To criticize the person, not just the code.
dralley 8y ago
I think this is understating it bit. He did mostly focus on technical aspects, but he did also occasionally say things like "whoever wrote this should be retroactively aborted", which is going waaaaaay too far and is going to make someone feel bad, period.

Mtinie 8y ago

> [...]I think the main factor driving this is the increasing presence of women in technology. I don’t agree. I find situations like these stem from the number of qualified developers interacting within these communities. In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. The only way to move the needle forward was to grin and bear it. Today, we have a greater density of talent with the diverse skills needed to contribute to these core projects. Caustic personalities aren’t worth dealing with any longer when you have a bunch of non-assholes you can rely on. Don’t be a dick, do your job without being abusive, and if the community you’ve been trying to contribute to finds you to be boorish and not worth the effort to engage with, adapt—as Linus is going to try to do.

wolfgke 8y ago
> In the past, when the depth of talent was small, people put up with epic levels of ego and bullshit. [...] Today, we have a greater density of talent I do not believe that the density of challenged. What has changed is that modern programming languages/technologies/... require much less talent to do something useful with. So a lot more people can (perhaps) do a meaningful contribution to the project. This makes much more projects possible. But it does not lead to the situation that more people can now contribute to projects of hard difficulty.

beguiledfoil 8y ago

I don't think it has anything to do with PC and has a lot to do with being C. There's a lot of bravado among older programmers that carries over from a time when they really could do whatever they wanted because stuff needed to get done and a principled, lone gunman solution could actually be a much closer approximation of correct than some BS consensus built monster. That simply isn't the world we work in anymore. Everything has been done and if it's being done again it's because the subtle mistakes and approximations of the past aren't good enough. Linus' complaints about the scheduler are the best example of what I'm talking about. A scheduler is a super hard problem now and there's a lot of complexity to wrestle with that simply didn't exist in 2001. Anyway, the kernel is still open and discussion is still happening so I don't think we're in some kind of crisis. Good for Linus to take time off - maybe this will be an opportunity to develop processes that can create a more dynamic open source environment, one less reliant on a few individuals.

yosito 8y ago

I agree. While I think it's good that he's trying to take more responsibility for his abrasiveness, and would have been good even decades ago, I think society is shifting (for the better) in a direction where it's much less acceptable to be abrasive. As an abrasive person myself, who's easily frustrated, but has a thick skin when it comes to other people being abrasive with me, I don't personally care if the world gets more polite or sensitive. But I also recognize that not everyone is as comfortable with roughness as I am, and the world will be a better place if everyone learns to be respectful and sensitive to the needs of others.

golemiprague 8y ago

I don't see so many women programmers, I see a lot of women hovering around in other roles but I don't think men should change their behaviour just because of that, manly behaviour is what created the huge success of the tech industry. I am also not a fan of being rude but being direct and clear is not such a problem and we shouldn't stop it and tiptoe around women just because they are women.

Nelson69 8y ago

Linking it to "PC" or "women" I think sort of undermines it on a larger level. To take part in opensource, especially a big project like Linux you have to be willing to put yourself out there a little bit. You have to put in some work, and then put something out there to possibly (probably?) be crapped on by people you respect. They might love it and merge it, they might hate it and tell you why, they might come back somewhere in the middle with a list of things to change that you may or may not agree with. They might ask you questions you can't answer, they might point things out that make you feel really silly. That element of risk is something many computer people have a hard time with, not just women or minorities. I got involved with the kernel a long while back, sent in a couple smallish things. Then I found what seemed like plutonium, the embedded project I was working on, we were literally spending like 1/3 or our cycles zeroing pages. Did some stuff to use MMX like instructions to do it and got a nice little bump. Turned if off entirely and got a huge bump. I/O took off like a rocket, all sorts of things got noticeably faster; like we were able to double what our project had to do. I had a more senior Linux guy coaching me up on this, a made man in the community, it was late one night when we discovered this so I put together some patches and sent if off to Linus, he was encouraging it. Linus was quiet for about a day and then sent back some pointed observations and was kind of making fun of me. Zeroing newly allocated pages is kind of important, it's a security risk to not do it and it happens for a reason. I felt like a total newb, and Linus had poked fun at me in an email, it didn't feel good. The made guy I was working with sort of picked me up, told me he does that to everybody and that it's good natured ribbing for the most part but before that I had just felt like crap. This guy I respect the hell out of was making fun of my contribution, I got over it pretty easily but I could easily see how others might not. There have been some fairly popular contributors (or maybe not, I don't know..) over the years that have basically managed their own forks with various patches (Con Kolivas' scheduler stuff stands out to me) because for whatever reasons they couldn't or wouldn't get stuff merged or accepted, even though it seemed to be really useful and appealing to a lot of others. In the heat of it all, it can seem really arbitrary too, you put some code together, you know it solves some problems and the community of developers doesn't want it or won't take it. Not sure what caused Linus to recognize it this time but I hope things improve, it's better for everyone.

8y ago

blt 8y ago

False. "The percentage of CS-degree holders who were women peaked in the 1980s at 34% and has been on a downward trend ever since" [1]. Women do not have an increasing presence in terms of population. Maybe the real phenomenon is that women are no longer accepting the culture that tends to form in male-dominated fields. [1] http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code%3A-why-aren-t-more-women-majoring-in-computer-science http://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/cracking-the-code%3A-why-ar...