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Actually, it isn't. For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" becau

Actually, it isn't. For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. So instead you walk it back and say things diplomatically (which is a tiny form of a white lie). Then people reply to your diplomatic statement with another diplomatic statement, and pretty soon nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all. Have you been to a corporate meeting? It feels like soul death for precisely this reason -- nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all. Tech/open-source was one of very few domains where people did say the thing they wanted to say. The culture selected for people who want to interact that way, and then encouraged that form of interaction. Now that's dead. Codes of conduct, inclusion, and caring about people's feelings are lofty ideals, but if people can't say "it's a stupid idea" when they think "it's a stupid idea" the whole thing will disintegrate into a dilbertesque nightmare along with the rest of the corporate America.

int_19h 8y ago
"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." That's Robert A. Heinlein, hardly known for being a social justice activist.
- coffeemug 8y ago
  There are different ways to oil the machine, I'm not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater in naivete. Lots of cultures encouraged being direct, were insanely productive, and oiled the gears in a different way. The current cultural trend is just fashion, it will pass, but things will get worse before they get better.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    And once again, being direct is orthogonal to being polite.
- jlawson 8y ago
  Heinlein wrote "honorifics and formal politeness". I interpret this as things like saying "please", "thank you", and other straightforward ritualistic decorative words - not as actually changing what you're actually saying to avoid hurting feelings. There's a big difference between reformatting the message and changing the message.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    What's described in the comment I responded to is exactly "reformatting the message" - you still communicate the same thing, ultimately, just in a way that allows the person on the receiving end to save face.
    - skriticos2 8y ago
      This reminds me of employee work reviews in Germany when they leave, that are mandated by law to be positive (not kidding). The result is that it spawned a new code language for HR people (there are dictionaries) that "translate" the review. Everybody is polite.. For instance the level of praise in with the various points indicates a scoring. Here are a few examples: He showed understanding for his work. -> He did not do anything. He did all the work with great diligence and interest. -> Eager, but not very efficient. He tried to do his job justice. -> The will was there, more unfortunately not. He has used his skills. -> He did what he could. That was not much. Here is a Google Translated page about it: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Farbeits-abc.de%2Fformulierungen-im-arbeitszeugnis-und-ihre-bedeutung%2F&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
      - mmirate 8y ago
        And of course, things like this only erode language semantics over time by making more and more words and phrases seem sarcastic; we have "/s" but there is no reliable marker of non-sarcasm (cf Poe's Law).
- marmot777 8y ago
  Yes, that's right. They haven't been in enough situations to see the good that civility can do and the wreckage that incivility can leave in its wake. I'm not speaking specifically about the Linus situation here but more as a general observation that most people have when they've been out in the world for more than a few years.
umanwizard 8y ago
There is a difference between blunt and abusive. Don't conflate them. "This code is wrong. We should not be doing things this way, and I'm rejecting the patch." vs. "You are a fucking retard for submitting this patch. Anyone who thinks like this should be retroactively aborted." The first style is blunt and to-the-point. The second is unnecessarily mean.
- jlawson 8y ago
  I agree with you but I think in the meetings coffeemug is describing, the first quote above would also be considered beyond the pale. You'd have to change it to something like, "I wonder if this patch could be improved somehow."
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    Well, I agree that it’s bad if you can’t say such things! But it doesn’t have much to do with Linus Torvalds whose rants were closer to the second example than the first.
jancsika 8y ago
> For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. What is no longer acceptable is to personally insult a developer for breaking things, poorly designing an API/implementation, etc. By "personally insult" I mean call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics. Judging from Linus' post, he agrees that stuff like that is unprofessional. And there are plenty of examples of Linus' posts where he clearly called particular developer stupid, as opposed to calling their ideas stupid. I can provide examples if you've never read one of them.
- coffeemug 8y ago
  > call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics. That's a positive change. But it also ought to be possible to say "this is a dumb idea" or to engage in friendly ribbing when someone does something dumb. These are good, healthy mechanisms in normal groups of people. Eliminate all teasing, and everyone is friendly on the outside and bitter and resentful on the inside. People should be teased for breaking things. There is such a thing as attempting to be too professional.
  - FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
    I completely agree. Calling an idea dumb is candid, I'd consider it a breath of fresh air from corporate speak. I left my prior position for similar concerns, specifically 'Architects' who I'd called out (and rather abruptly so) when they quoted AWS as being 'not redundant and only have one DataCentre'. We're not talking a conversation from 10 years ago either. This was June last year! Comments or statements like that need to be shouted out of the room. I feel there's a finesse to be drawn and understood here. If some one states, AWS is single site and no one else in the room challenges the stupidity of the claim. Some one ought to. That guys/girl is a fucking idiot. But some one who perhaps needs to be coaxed or massaged into a different angle because their code base will grow 90% in size? Depending on the context that might be for the best. Or it might not be. Coming back to my earlier analogy. Hammers and scalpels are both honest. Different tools for different needs.
mattdeboard 8y ago
Ok, can I just ask, what do you think people are lying about when they’re being diplomatic about criticism? You said being diplomatic is a “tiny form of a white lie”, so I’m wondering who you think is being deceived, and what you think they are they being deceived about.
- coffeemug 8y ago
  When you think a specific thought, feel a specific feeling, but express it in a way that really doesn't feel true to you deep in your core, you're deceiving the other person about who you are. That's how many relationships fall apart. You tell each other tiny white lies, and five years later you've discovered the lies have compounded and the relationship is too poisoned to recover. The same thing happens to cultures at scale.
  - grzm 8y ago
    If the way you truly feel at your core is expressed in a way that has unintended consequences, this "being true to yourself" can get in the way of you being an effective leader, five (or thirty) years later. There are two pieces here: one is the message you intend to convey, and the other is the manner in which you convey it. The two are not the same. The idea that as long as you speak the truth it doesn't matter how you say it ignores that how (and whether) people will accept what you say depends on the vessel in which the message is carried. The idea that others should just take it because it's the truth is at its heart just naive and inhuman (not to mention inhumane), and ineffective. If being true to your inner self is getting in the way of you being effective, it's ultimately counter-productive to your own ends: it's not actually being true to your self. Yes, lying (including white lies), is detrimental. So is bottling things up. I completely agree. However, this is not zero-sum, either/or. You can both express how you really feel and convey it in a way that others will receive your message in the manner in it's intended.
  - mattdeboard 8y ago
    You can give honest, useful feedback without using words like "stupid." The fact is resorting to insults and name-calling is toxic. If you can't provide constructive, honest feedback without being an asshole, you need to work on yourself.
ggreer 8y ago
I totally agree with this. I actually quit my job at Red Hat because of the culture of non-criticism. I kept getting in trouble for pushing back against stupid decisions, even though I never insulted a single person. For example: When the design team added 10MB of web fonts to the app, I said something like, "Users don't care whether the font is Open Sans or Arial. They care whether things load quickly and don't re-flow. This is a bad decision." I got nothing but condemnation for pointing this out. Today, every user downloads several megabytes of web fonts which have broken kerning and hinting on some platforms.[1] It was a similar story when people wanted to change our build artifact to be based on RHEL instead of Alpine Linux.[2] This would have bloated the build artifact from 11MB to 200MB, introduced a host of security concerns, and drastically increased CI build times. In a meeting I said, "This decision seems totally braindead." I was immediately taken aside and given a stern talking-to by my manager. If that's not a braindead decision, then I don't know what is. I also got in trouble for this comment[3] pointing out flaws in PatternFly. I was told that some of my coworkers felt insulted by my comment, and that I should be more civil and tactful. Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting? I never got answers to those questions. Encouraging civility sounds like a good thing, but in my experience the people leading the charge are doing it to suppress criticism. 1. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 My bullet point about reducing the build artifact from 11.3MB to 7.6MB was incorrect. It actually reduced the build artifact from 40MB to 7.6MB. 2. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/12 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/12 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163740
- enchexe 8y ago
  CoreOS was acquired several months ago. You feel you were able to accurately understand the culture of a corporation attempting to bring in CoreOS to the fold that quickly? And you are confused why co-workers would be less than pleased with public condemnation about a corporate project from someone who joined as an acquisition barely any time ago? If you truly can't put yourself in other's shoes and understand why they may feel that way, justly or not, I would strongly suggest counseling. I mean that with all sincerity.
  - 8y ago
DoreenMichele 8y ago
I think "It's a stupid idea" is not a great criticism. It lacks detail as to why you think it won't work. I think in a healthy culture, you should be able to say why you think it won't work, even if you don't call it "a stupid idea." But I'm sorry you are dealing with an unhealthy culture where "politeness and respect" require you to walk on egg shells. To my mind, that's not what should be happening. I talk to my sons at times about the following idea: I say "chair" and maybe my mind conjures up a wooden kitchen chair and the person I am speaking with envisions an overstuffed living room chair. Then we start to argue because we aren't even really talking about the same thing, but we think we are because we don't realize the word "chair" means something so different to each of us. So I will suggest that some people here have experienced environments where communicating clearly was not "asshole" behavior and others have not experienced that. Such people can be equally convinced they are correct and failing to understand they really aren't talking about the same thing. Growing up, I hated pineapple. But I had never had anything but canned pineapple and it was awful. While living on the West Coast, I began eating fresh pineapple, not canned. And it's incredible. Sometimes, it's a bit like people are arguing about whether pineapple is wonderful or awful and not realizing that one party has only ever had canned pineapple and the other has only ever had fresh pineapple and neither side ever thinks to specify that detail because it seems like a given.
BeetleB 8y ago
>it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. "This seems stupid to me" is a considerably lazy statement. What's worse, it doesn't have any meaningful content beyond "I don't like it." I've yet to see anyone's feelings hurt with the following: "I'm rejecting your proposition because I believe it will lead to X, Y and Z (problems)" "Your proposal is not going to work because of X, Y and Z". "I'm not seeing the benefit of this. Can you explain what we have to gain by it?" And probably a dozen other direct statements. At the workplace, I don't care who thinks what idea is idiotic. I care whether they can speak for or against it. And I care whether they are open or close minded about it. Saying "This seems stupid to me" is providing zero contribution to the process.
- frant-hartm 8y ago
  >Your proposal is not going to work and >I'm not seeing the benefit of this are very indirect statements in my vocabulary.
  - BeetleB 8y ago
    You can't get any more direct than "your proposal is not going to work". There's no ambiguity in there, and nothing left for the person to guess.
marmot777 8y ago
You can be direct without being obnoxious, no?
Sean1708 8y ago
There is a middle ground though. Linus wasn't just direct, he was outright derogatory. If Linus stops saying (not an actual quote) "this is a stupid idea and you are a retard for suggesting it" and starts saying "this is a stupid idea" instead, then that's a massive improvement. Edit: Of course being constructive with your criticism is even better.
pavel_lishin 8y ago
Congrats, you're not a pushover.
X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago
"it's a stupid idea" is terrible feedback. Talking about why something shouldn't be done or why another way is preferable is way better. Saying something is stupid will only work if you have complete power. If you explain why you think one approach is better than the other you can actually affect change without just holding the power.
noelsusman 8y ago
I say exactly what I think all the time and have never had a problem with it. If "I think this is stupid" is all you can come up with, then the problem is with you. You can simply say "I think we should do X instead because of Y and Z" and get the same exact point across. You're still being direct and not skirting around the issue at all. It's not even about caring about other people's feelings because it's the right thing to do or whatever. It's just a more productive work environment. Attacking people personally triggers defense mechanisms in their brain that almost always lead to bad outcomes. The overwhelming majority of people have brains that work like this, and denying that reality is not going to lead to anything good.

int_19h 8y ago

"Moving parts in rubbing contact require lubrication to avoid excessive wear. Honorifics and formal politeness provide lubrication where people rub together. Often the very young, the untravelled, the naive, the unsophisticated deplore these formalities as "empty," "meaningless," or "dishonest," and scorn to use them. No matter how "pure" their motives, they thereby throw sand into machinery that does not work too well at best." That's Robert A. Heinlein, hardly known for being a social justice activist.

coffeemug 8y ago
There are different ways to oil the machine, I'm not throwing out the baby along with the bathwater in naivete. Lots of cultures encouraged being direct, were insanely productive, and oiled the gears in a different way. The current cultural trend is just fashion, it will pass, but things will get worse before they get better.
- int_19h 8y ago
  And once again, being direct is orthogonal to being polite.
jlawson 8y ago
Heinlein wrote "honorifics and formal politeness". I interpret this as things like saying "please", "thank you", and other straightforward ritualistic decorative words - not as actually changing what you're actually saying to avoid hurting feelings. There's a big difference between reformatting the message and changing the message.
- int_19h 8y ago
  What's described in the comment I responded to is exactly "reformatting the message" - you still communicate the same thing, ultimately, just in a way that allows the person on the receiving end to save face.
  - skriticos2 8y ago
    This reminds me of employee work reviews in Germany when they leave, that are mandated by law to be positive (not kidding). The result is that it spawned a new code language for HR people (there are dictionaries) that "translate" the review. Everybody is polite.. For instance the level of praise in with the various points indicates a scoring. Here are a few examples: He showed understanding for his work. -> He did not do anything. He did all the work with great diligence and interest. -> Eager, but not very efficient. He tried to do his job justice. -> The will was there, more unfortunately not. He has used his skills. -> He did what he could. That was not much. Here is a Google Translated page about it: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=https%3A%2F%2Farbeits-abc.de%2Fformulierungen-im-arbeitszeugnis-und-ihre-bedeutung%2F&edit-text=&act=url https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...
    - mmirate 8y ago
      And of course, things like this only erode language semantics over time by making more and more words and phrases seem sarcastic; we have "/s" but there is no reliable marker of non-sarcasm (cf Poe's Law).
marmot777 8y ago
Yes, that's right. They haven't been in enough situations to see the good that civility can do and the wreckage that incivility can leave in its wake. I'm not speaking specifically about the Linus situation here but more as a general observation that most people have when they've been out in the world for more than a few years.

umanwizard 8y ago

There is a difference between blunt and abusive. Don't conflate them. "This code is wrong. We should not be doing things this way, and I'm rejecting the patch." vs. "You are a fucking retard for submitting this patch. Anyone who thinks like this should be retroactively aborted." The first style is blunt and to-the-point. The second is unnecessarily mean.

jlawson 8y ago
I agree with you but I think in the meetings coffeemug is describing, the first quote above would also be considered beyond the pale. You'd have to change it to something like, "I wonder if this patch could be improved somehow."
- umanwizard 8y ago
  Well, I agree that it’s bad if you can’t say such things! But it doesn’t have much to do with Linus Torvalds whose rants were closer to the second example than the first.

jancsika 8y ago

> For example in today's environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. What is no longer acceptable is to personally insult a developer for breaking things, poorly designing an API/implementation, etc. By "personally insult" I mean call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics. Judging from Linus' post, he agrees that stuff like that is unprofessional. And there are plenty of examples of Linus' posts where he clearly called particular developer stupid, as opposed to calling their ideas stupid. I can provide examples if you've never read one of them.

coffeemug 8y ago
> call someone names, curse at them, sarcastically suggest they should have been aborted, and many other such tactics. That's a positive change. But it also ought to be possible to say "this is a dumb idea" or to engage in friendly ribbing when someone does something dumb. These are good, healthy mechanisms in normal groups of people. Eliminate all teasing, and everyone is friendly on the outside and bitter and resentful on the inside. People should be teased for breaking things. There is such a thing as attempting to be too professional.
- FuckOffNeemo 8y ago
  I completely agree. Calling an idea dumb is candid, I'd consider it a breath of fresh air from corporate speak. I left my prior position for similar concerns, specifically 'Architects' who I'd called out (and rather abruptly so) when they quoted AWS as being 'not redundant and only have one DataCentre'. We're not talking a conversation from 10 years ago either. This was June last year! Comments or statements like that need to be shouted out of the room. I feel there's a finesse to be drawn and understood here. If some one states, AWS is single site and no one else in the room challenges the stupidity of the claim. Some one ought to. That guys/girl is a fucking idiot. But some one who perhaps needs to be coaxed or massaged into a different angle because their code base will grow 90% in size? Depending on the context that might be for the best. Or it might not be. Coming back to my earlier analogy. Hammers and scalpels are both honest. Different tools for different needs.

mattdeboard 8y ago

Ok, can I just ask, what do you think people are lying about when they’re being diplomatic about criticism? You said being diplomatic is a “tiny form of a white lie”, so I’m wondering who you think is being deceived, and what you think they are they being deceived about.

coffeemug 8y ago
When you think a specific thought, feel a specific feeling, but express it in a way that really doesn't feel true to you deep in your core, you're deceiving the other person about who you are. That's how many relationships fall apart. You tell each other tiny white lies, and five years later you've discovered the lies have compounded and the relationship is too poisoned to recover. The same thing happens to cultures at scale.
- grzm 8y ago
  If the way you truly feel at your core is expressed in a way that has unintended consequences, this "being true to yourself" can get in the way of you being an effective leader, five (or thirty) years later. There are two pieces here: one is the message you intend to convey, and the other is the manner in which you convey it. The two are not the same. The idea that as long as you speak the truth it doesn't matter how you say it ignores that how (and whether) people will accept what you say depends on the vessel in which the message is carried. The idea that others should just take it because it's the truth is at its heart just naive and inhuman (not to mention inhumane), and ineffective. If being true to your inner self is getting in the way of you being effective, it's ultimately counter-productive to your own ends: it's not actually being true to your self. Yes, lying (including white lies), is detrimental. So is bottling things up. I completely agree. However, this is not zero-sum, either/or. You can both express how you really feel and convey it in a way that others will receive your message in the manner in it's intended.
- mattdeboard 8y ago
  You can give honest, useful feedback without using words like "stupid." The fact is resorting to insults and name-calling is toxic. If you can't provide constructive, honest feedback without being an asshole, you need to work on yourself.

ggreer 8y ago

I totally agree with this. I actually quit my job at Red Hat because of the culture of non-criticism. I kept getting in trouble for pushing back against stupid decisions, even though I never insulted a single person. For example: When the design team added 10MB of web fonts to the app, I said something like, "Users don't care whether the font is Open Sans or Arial. They care whether things load quickly and don't re-flow. This is a bad decision." I got nothing but condemnation for pointing this out. Today, every user downloads several megabytes of web fonts which have broken kerning and hinting on some platforms.[1] It was a similar story when people wanted to change our build artifact to be based on RHEL instead of Alpine Linux.[2] This would have bloated the build artifact from 11MB to 200MB, introduced a host of security concerns, and drastically increased CI build times. In a meeting I said, "This decision seems totally braindead." I was immediately taken aside and given a stern talking-to by my manager. If that's not a braindead decision, then I don't know what is. I also got in trouble for this comment[3] pointing out flaws in PatternFly. I was told that some of my coworkers felt insulted by my comment, and that I should be more civil and tactful. Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting? I never got answers to those questions. Encouraging civility sounds like a good thing, but in my experience the people leading the charge are doing it to suppress criticism. 1. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/3 My bullet point about reducing the build artifact from 11.3MB to 7.6MB was incorrect. It actually reduced the build artifact from 40MB to 7.6MB. 2. https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/12 https://github.com/openshift/console/pull/12 3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163740 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17163740

enchexe 8y ago
CoreOS was acquired several months ago. You feel you were able to accurately understand the culture of a corporation attempting to bring in CoreOS to the fold that quickly? And you are confused why co-workers would be less than pleased with public condemnation about a corporate project from someone who joined as an acquisition barely any time ago? If you truly can't put yourself in other's shoes and understand why they may feel that way, justly or not, I would strongly suggest counseling. I mean that with all sincerity.
- 8y ago

DoreenMichele 8y ago

I think "It's a stupid idea" is not a great criticism. It lacks detail as to why you think it won't work. I think in a healthy culture, you should be able to say why you think it won't work, even if you don't call it "a stupid idea." But I'm sorry you are dealing with an unhealthy culture where "politeness and respect" require you to walk on egg shells. To my mind, that's not what should be happening. I talk to my sons at times about the following idea: I say "chair" and maybe my mind conjures up a wooden kitchen chair and the person I am speaking with envisions an overstuffed living room chair. Then we start to argue because we aren't even really talking about the same thing, but we think we are because we don't realize the word "chair" means something so different to each of us. So I will suggest that some people here have experienced environments where communicating clearly was not "asshole" behavior and others have not experienced that. Such people can be equally convinced they are correct and failing to understand they really aren't talking about the same thing. Growing up, I hated pineapple. But I had never had anything but canned pineapple and it was awful. While living on the West Coast, I began eating fresh pineapple, not canned. And it's incredible. Sometimes, it's a bit like people are arguing about whether pineapple is wonderful or awful and not realizing that one party has only ever had canned pineapple and the other has only ever had fresh pineapple and neither side ever thinks to specify that detail because it seems like a given.

BeetleB 8y ago

>it is no longer acceptable to say "this seems stupid to me" because it might hurt someone's feelings. "This seems stupid to me" is a considerably lazy statement. What's worse, it doesn't have any meaningful content beyond "I don't like it." I've yet to see anyone's feelings hurt with the following: "I'm rejecting your proposition because I believe it will lead to X, Y and Z (problems)" "Your proposal is not going to work because of X, Y and Z". "I'm not seeing the benefit of this. Can you explain what we have to gain by it?" And probably a dozen other direct statements. At the workplace, I don't care who thinks what idea is idiotic. I care whether they can speak for or against it. And I care whether they are open or close minded about it. Saying "This seems stupid to me" is providing zero contribution to the process.

frant-hartm 8y ago
>Your proposal is not going to work and >I'm not seeing the benefit of this are very indirect statements in my vocabulary.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  You can't get any more direct than "your proposal is not going to work". There's no ambiguity in there, and nothing left for the person to guess.

marmot777 8y ago

You can be direct without being obnoxious, no?

Sean1708 8y ago

There is a middle ground though. Linus wasn't just direct, he was outright derogatory. If Linus stops saying (not an actual quote) "this is a stupid idea and you are a retard for suggesting it" and starts saying "this is a stupid idea" instead, then that's a massive improvement. Edit: Of course being constructive with your criticism is even better.

pavel_lishin 8y ago

Congrats, you're not a pushover.

X6S1x6Okd1st 8y ago

"it's a stupid idea" is terrible feedback. Talking about why something shouldn't be done or why another way is preferable is way better. Saying something is stupid will only work if you have complete power. If you explain why you think one approach is better than the other you can actually affect change without just holding the power.

noelsusman 8y ago

I say exactly what I think all the time and have never had a problem with it. If "I think this is stupid" is all you can come up with, then the problem is with you. You can simply say "I think we should do X instead because of Y and Z" and get the same exact point across. You're still being direct and not skirting around the issue at all. It's not even about caring about other people's feelings because it's the right thing to do or whatever. It's just a more productive work environment. Attacking people personally triggers defense mechanisms in their brain that almost always lead to bad outcomes. The overwhelming majority of people have brains that work like this, and denying that reality is not going to lead to anything good.