11 ms·

I'd bet people tend to cluster onto the line separating "agreeable and lax" and "rude but firm" (as a sweeping generality) Consider this: A third ca

I'd bet people tend to cluster onto the line separating "agreeable and lax" and "rude but firm" (as a sweeping generality) Consider this: A third category of people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. They are essentially imposing their will on others, but are able to do it in a way that is not "rude." This is called charisma. - "Agreeable and lax"... you allow them to paint the fence however they want, even if their work is shoddy. you may wind up doing it yourself because you don't feel comfortable enforcing your will on others. or perhaps you just wind up with a crappy looking fence. - "Rude but firm"... you don't care about others' feelings and force them somehow to to paint the fence to your specifications. either by physical force, economic force (you have money they need) or some other means - "Charisma"... you convince them that painting the fence the way you want it painted is the best possible thing they could be doing. they willingly paint it for you because they believe it is a good cause and a good use of their time. (note: this does not necessarily imply dishonesty or trickery. arguably, the most charismatic people might be those that are true believers) https://www.google.com/search?q=tom+sawyer+fence https://www.google.com/search?q=tom+sawyer+fence Somewhat tangential, somewhat related: Sun Tzu wrote that the most perfect form of victory was adding the enemies' forces to you own by convincing them to support your cause.

femto 8y ago
> this does not necessarily imply dishonesty or trickery. arguably, the most charismatic people might be those that are true believers Not ruling out that a true believer might have deceived themselves! (It's turtles all the way down when trying to answer that about yourself.)
hyperpallium 8y ago
> people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. Like Linus.
- jjeaff 8y ago
  Is anyone really rallied to the cause by Linus himself? I think the product is the only real draw. With the exception of a select few that simply want to work with someone as high profile and legendary as Linus.
  - nomel 8y ago
    Personally, and maybe I’m in the minority when thinking this, but I can’t stand working with polite people. They not only slow down the progress of a project by often causing unneeded busywork, from simply not halting bad ideas, they often slow my learning progress down by not telling me I’m wrong. If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out! There’s obviously a happy medium somewhere in there, and Linus isn’t it, but I would much prefer working with a Linus than someone polite. From the history I’ve read, he’s not holding grudges, or necessarily attacking people, he’s attacking dumb approaches and ideas, which happen to be authored by people. At least that’s how I’ve always interpreted his rants.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      Politeness should be low-cost. People going out of their way to make everything super nice are treating everyone as though they have fragile egos. What people really want is to just know technically and precisely what is right and what is wrong so they can improve — leaving out all of the personal crap, positive and negative, except in the ways that people working together have normal human social relationships. So, like we can chat about our lives in downtime, water-cooler talk, and we can get to know one another. Extra politeness doesn't do that, it's just superficial. This is what I'm saying: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/04/616127481/when-everything-clicks-the-power-of-judgment-free-learning https://www.npr.org/2018/06/04/616127481/when-everything-cli...
      - picsao 8y ago
        >Politeness should be low-cost. People going out of their way to make everything super nice are treating everyone as though they have fragile egos. Sir, your brunt attack on the concepts of honor and identity disgusts me. If I had my pistols with me, to silence that dissent in a duel.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  Certainly he has done far, far, far more good than bad. I don't think anybody feels otherwise. I would say he's something of a hero to me! He has certainly rallied many to his cause. As much good as he has done, could he do some things better? Linus certainly feels so. Interesting that so many here seem doubt Linus' own assertion.
  - supernovae 8y ago
    Have you ever worked with brilliant assholes? It sucks the life out of you - and it really sucks when they get idolized and rewarded heavily. It creates a vicious cycle of absurdity - the one where people appease the anger to try and achieve some good not realizing how much the bad influences the culture of the movement/organization/group. No one is perfect, but the community for far to long treated an imperfect man as if he could do no wrong - to its own detriment. Not in quality of software, no one disputes that - but in quality of life and respect for other human beings and other views/ideas. I think it's terrible we accept this idea that it takes an asshole to make a community
    - reitanqild 8y ago
      > Have you ever worked with brilliant assholes? It sucks the life out of you - and it really sucks when they get idolized and rewarded heavily. I have. The problem was not so much the things he wrote in public but what he said (that couldn't be documented) or probably told the bosses (which also could not be documented.) He was a (mostly) well mannered and soft spoken guy esp. compared to the image of Linus, but he made me quit my then dream job and I'm pretty sure I'd preferred working with Linus. Also in school I had another one: well behaving, soft spoken (mostly) but who turned out didn't care about others except as a way to get what he wanted. I'm really happy to not work a place where I get yelled at either but at least Linus seems fair so I think I'd prefer him. It's also interesting to see him admitting it might be a problem in his own way: wanting to ralk to someone, joking about tooling, asking for ideas.
      - serversystem 8y ago
        I think he's like that in maillists and not in person as are many real life geeks/keyboard warriors?
- DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
  You gain followers when you work for a the benefit for others. You lose followers when you treat people badly. Belittling people in a public forum is bad behaviour. I'm amazed its taken so long for the penny to drop. This is in any half decent company's Anti-Bullying training. It's not like you need to be particularly empathetic to learn this stuff.
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
You may enjoy a book called The Power Paradox. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-paradox-by-dacher-keltner/9780143110293/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-pa...
bipson 8y ago
There is a fourth category that fits your description of charismatic people quite well IMO: psychopaths. The distinction can be quite hard and might take some time.
- dannypgh 8y ago
  I disagree that it's a good fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy "Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is traditionally defined as a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits." Not quite sure how you got there from charisma.
  - bipson 8y ago
    I met several seemingly charismatic "leaders" in my professional life that turned out to be manipulative egoists that didn't care about the effects of their doings, unless it affected them or their plans. We, that were affected went on to call them sociopaths. I am not a health professional, so we might have misused that term. I was actually looking for the term sociopath.
jek0 8y ago
Those thing are not mutually exclusive. You can be both Charismatic and Rude. Many people are happily following Linus' directions. Sometime he enforces those directions rudely, which drives some people away. It also prevents crappy patches from stubborn contributors from going through.
- fapjacks 8y ago
  Totally. I've always felt that's the price for having the Linux kernel be what it is today. Just imagine what kinds of shit would get merged into the kernel if it was run by a council of submissive, overly-polite people with soft handshakes. I always considered certain kinds of programming to be like smithing on a hot forge: If you can't handle the occasional burn, then it's not for you. I mean this idea is not even a little bit controversial when it's about tangential things, for example people that are unable to work with tight deadlines in stressful situations. Either you can do it, or you can't. Nobody would reasonably suggest changing the market or the business model to accommodate. Because you can't reasonably suggest that, because reality just doesn't work that way. We can only get a Linux kernel of the caliber we have today by using a hot forge. Now it's certainly true that some good ideas will be deflected in these kinds of environments -- just as happens in all environments -- but nobody would reasonably suggest that any kind of environment could achieve perfect meritocratic efficiency, either. Because it's not possible to do that anymore than it's possible to make financial markets less stressful places to work with looser deadlines. This is a roundabout way of saying that this (and everything like it) boils down to innate competitive humanity and as we all know, when it comes to anything that involves more than one person, you can't make everyone happy all the time.
  - blablabla123 8y ago
    I think the comparison with the workplace doesn't work really well. Linux is an Open-Source project, with the exception of some people that get paid by their employer to hack on the Linux kernel, people work on it voluntarily. This is a whole different universe. To be honest, I don't see any point in overly hot forges in the workplace. People hopefully go to work because they like what they do there. But on the other hand it's sometimes difficult to prevent, like as you might suggest in financial market jobs, or of course in many Startup jobs which don't have much money. Anyways, Linux is a project made by Linus Torvalds and it developed along his Philosophy of doing this. If someone doesn't like that, there are enough choices like Windows or macOS. Or for more tech-savvy people there are other options like for instance the BSD flavours.
LinuxBender 8y ago
I personally like calm, rational logical inspirational leaders. I would like the fictional Captain Picard! Those are very hard to find. In my humble opinion, I believe you will find a lot of disagreement on methodologies throughout this thread as some folks are introverts, some extroverts and a wide range in between. Each person here will have had their own personal experiences that were a result of a mix of personality types. If we just go by Jung, that's a matrix of 16 types. The possibilities and interactions are quite extensive. I believe that each org filters down their group to a certain mix of personalities that are tolerable (cultural fit). The more critical someone is, the slightly more that people will tolerate in exchange for what they contribute. I suppose what I am suggesting is that there is no single form of leadership that is entirely optimal in any org. The mix of personalities can block rational discussion. There are some websites where people discuss the toxic results in their org.
- acjohnson55 8y ago
  > I believe that each org filters down their group to a certain mix of personalities that are tolerable (cultural fit). The more critical someone is, the slightly more that people will tolerate in exchange for what they contribute. While I think that's true, I don't think it's scalable. You can get a startup off the ground with a team of 20 and a serious bro culture. But the bigger you get and the more touchpoints you have with the outside world, the more an inclusive company culture becomes an advantage. It's not as simple as saying inclusivity is necessary. It obviously isn't. After all, you can build large systems on architectures that scale poorly, too. But I do believe it's a long-term advantage.
  - LinuxBender 8y ago
    Agreed. I believe that as companies get bigger, this behavior narrows down to specific orgs in the company. Dev teams and operations teams will each have their own filtered set of personalities too. Even then, I know I am over simplifying.
- JohnBooty 8y ago
  I personally like calm, rational logical inspirational leaders. I would like the fictional Captain Picard! Those are very hard to find. Great example! He was fictional, of course, but he was a good example of a leader who took no shit and held his crew to high standards, yet cared deeply for his crew and did not resort to petty rants. Although didn't he sleep with or almost sleep with Dr. Crusher? Maybe Linus shouldn't emulate that part.
Terretta 8y ago
> "A third category of people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. They are essentially imposing their will on others, but are able to do it in a way that is not "rude." This is called charisma... does not necessarily imply dishonesty or trickery; arguably, the most charismatic people might be those that are true believers" I find it helpful to distinguish between charisma and presence. Charisma can be on the surface, think marketing. Pop biz lit tends to focus on this aspect. Presence comes from within, confidence from mastery grounded in centeredness and integrity. This distinction comes from Scouller's "The Three Levels of Leadership", 2011. See the synopsis on "Attitude towards others" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_model#Personal_leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_mod... Then the discussion on "Leadership Presence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_model#Leadership_presence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_mod...
yawboakye 8y ago
I'm finding it hard to think in these categories. The success of Linux is down to something Linus does and/or gets right. Even more fascinating, it might not be down to anything about him but the product he first created. So, anyone might claim "charisma" for getting the wall to be painted in their choice color but the painters just wanted a painted wall, and regardless of the attitude of the wall builder they were going to paint it.
- greenhatman 8y ago
  To me it seems that there is a weird kind of paradox. While Linus often say very mean things to people, most people I think still feel welcome regardless of it. He has also routinely said and explained that he wants work with everyone, regardless of whether he thinks they're playing fair or not. I'm referring here to his stance of not pursuing legal action against GPL infringers. He'd rather work on the relationship than write them off. This I think has been very important in driving Linux adoption and cooperation. This is something almost any leader probably would not have done. So I think we can be very grateful towards Linux for this. On the other hand, you get people who insist strongly on being nice, but are super quick to write off relationships or ban people from their organisations and projects when they're not following rules. This probably tends not to be great for the longevity of these projects.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Fri31Aug 8y ago
How does the charismatic reject people who want to join but who doesn't share the cause as (s)he understand it.

femto 8y ago

> this does not necessarily imply dishonesty or trickery. arguably, the most charismatic people might be those that are true believers Not ruling out that a true believer might have deceived themselves! (It's turtles all the way down when trying to answer that about yourself.)

hyperpallium 8y ago

> people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. Like Linus.

jjeaff 8y ago
Is anyone really rallied to the cause by Linus himself? I think the product is the only real draw. With the exception of a select few that simply want to work with someone as high profile and legendary as Linus.
- nomel 8y ago
  Personally, and maybe I’m in the minority when thinking this, but I can’t stand working with polite people. They not only slow down the progress of a project by often causing unneeded busywork, from simply not halting bad ideas, they often slow my learning progress down by not telling me I’m wrong. If you see something stupid, call it out. If I’m doing something stupid or say something wrong, call me out! There’s obviously a happy medium somewhere in there, and Linus isn’t it, but I would much prefer working with a Linus than someone polite. From the history I’ve read, he’s not holding grudges, or necessarily attacking people, he’s attacking dumb approaches and ideas, which happen to be authored by people. At least that’s how I’ve always interpreted his rants.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    Politeness should be low-cost. People going out of their way to make everything super nice are treating everyone as though they have fragile egos. What people really want is to just know technically and precisely what is right and what is wrong so they can improve — leaving out all of the personal crap, positive and negative, except in the ways that people working together have normal human social relationships. So, like we can chat about our lives in downtime, water-cooler talk, and we can get to know one another. Extra politeness doesn't do that, it's just superficial. This is what I'm saying: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/04/616127481/when-everything-clicks-the-power-of-judgment-free-learning https://www.npr.org/2018/06/04/616127481/when-everything-cli...
    - picsao 8y ago
      >Politeness should be low-cost. People going out of their way to make everything super nice are treating everyone as though they have fragile egos. Sir, your brunt attack on the concepts of honor and identity disgusts me. If I had my pistols with me, to silence that dissent in a duel.
JohnBooty 8y ago
Certainly he has done far, far, far more good than bad. I don't think anybody feels otherwise. I would say he's something of a hero to me! He has certainly rallied many to his cause. As much good as he has done, could he do some things better? Linus certainly feels so. Interesting that so many here seem doubt Linus' own assertion.
- supernovae 8y ago
  Have you ever worked with brilliant assholes? It sucks the life out of you - and it really sucks when they get idolized and rewarded heavily. It creates a vicious cycle of absurdity - the one where people appease the anger to try and achieve some good not realizing how much the bad influences the culture of the movement/organization/group. No one is perfect, but the community for far to long treated an imperfect man as if he could do no wrong - to its own detriment. Not in quality of software, no one disputes that - but in quality of life and respect for other human beings and other views/ideas. I think it's terrible we accept this idea that it takes an asshole to make a community
  - reitanqild 8y ago
    > Have you ever worked with brilliant assholes? It sucks the life out of you - and it really sucks when they get idolized and rewarded heavily. I have. The problem was not so much the things he wrote in public but what he said (that couldn't be documented) or probably told the bosses (which also could not be documented.) He was a (mostly) well mannered and soft spoken guy esp. compared to the image of Linus, but he made me quit my then dream job and I'm pretty sure I'd preferred working with Linus. Also in school I had another one: well behaving, soft spoken (mostly) but who turned out didn't care about others except as a way to get what he wanted. I'm really happy to not work a place where I get yelled at either but at least Linus seems fair so I think I'd prefer him. It's also interesting to see him admitting it might be a problem in his own way: wanting to ralk to someone, joking about tooling, asking for ideas.
    - serversystem 8y ago
      I think he's like that in maillists and not in person as are many real life geeks/keyboard warriors?
DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago
You gain followers when you work for a the benefit for others. You lose followers when you treat people badly. Belittling people in a public forum is bad behaviour. I'm amazed its taken so long for the penny to drop. This is in any half decent company's Anti-Bullying training. It's not like you need to be particularly empathetic to learn this stuff.

DEADBEEFC0FFEE 8y ago

You may enjoy a book called The Power Paradox. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-paradox-by-dacher-keltner/9780143110293/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/312367/the-power-pa...

bipson 8y ago

There is a fourth category that fits your description of charismatic people quite well IMO: psychopaths. The distinction can be quite hard and might take some time.

dannypgh 8y ago
I disagree that it's a good fit. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy "Psychopathy, sometimes considered synonymous with sociopathy, is traditionally defined as a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits." Not quite sure how you got there from charisma.
- bipson 8y ago
  I met several seemingly charismatic "leaders" in my professional life that turned out to be manipulative egoists that didn't care about the effects of their doings, unless it affected them or their plans. We, that were affected went on to call them sociopaths. I am not a health professional, so we might have misused that term. I was actually looking for the term sociopath.

jek0 8y ago

Those thing are not mutually exclusive. You can be both Charismatic and Rude. Many people are happily following Linus' directions. Sometime he enforces those directions rudely, which drives some people away. It also prevents crappy patches from stubborn contributors from going through.

fapjacks 8y ago
Totally. I've always felt that's the price for having the Linux kernel be what it is today. Just imagine what kinds of shit would get merged into the kernel if it was run by a council of submissive, overly-polite people with soft handshakes. I always considered certain kinds of programming to be like smithing on a hot forge: If you can't handle the occasional burn, then it's not for you. I mean this idea is not even a little bit controversial when it's about tangential things, for example people that are unable to work with tight deadlines in stressful situations. Either you can do it, or you can't. Nobody would reasonably suggest changing the market or the business model to accommodate. Because you can't reasonably suggest that, because reality just doesn't work that way. We can only get a Linux kernel of the caliber we have today by using a hot forge. Now it's certainly true that some good ideas will be deflected in these kinds of environments -- just as happens in all environments -- but nobody would reasonably suggest that any kind of environment could achieve perfect meritocratic efficiency, either. Because it's not possible to do that anymore than it's possible to make financial markets less stressful places to work with looser deadlines. This is a roundabout way of saying that this (and everything like it) boils down to innate competitive humanity and as we all know, when it comes to anything that involves more than one person, you can't make everyone happy all the time.
- blablabla123 8y ago
  I think the comparison with the workplace doesn't work really well. Linux is an Open-Source project, with the exception of some people that get paid by their employer to hack on the Linux kernel, people work on it voluntarily. This is a whole different universe. To be honest, I don't see any point in overly hot forges in the workplace. People hopefully go to work because they like what they do there. But on the other hand it's sometimes difficult to prevent, like as you might suggest in financial market jobs, or of course in many Startup jobs which don't have much money. Anyways, Linux is a project made by Linus Torvalds and it developed along his Philosophy of doing this. If someone doesn't like that, there are enough choices like Windows or macOS. Or for more tech-savvy people there are other options like for instance the BSD flavours.

LinuxBender 8y ago

I personally like calm, rational logical inspirational leaders. I would like the fictional Captain Picard! Those are very hard to find. In my humble opinion, I believe you will find a lot of disagreement on methodologies throughout this thread as some folks are introverts, some extroverts and a wide range in between. Each person here will have had their own personal experiences that were a result of a mix of personality types. If we just go by Jung, that's a matrix of 16 types. The possibilities and interactions are quite extensive. I believe that each org filters down their group to a certain mix of personalities that are tolerable (cultural fit). The more critical someone is, the slightly more that people will tolerate in exchange for what they contribute. I suppose what I am suggesting is that there is no single form of leadership that is entirely optimal in any org. The mix of personalities can block rational discussion. There are some websites where people discuss the toxic results in their org.

acjohnson55 8y ago
> I believe that each org filters down their group to a certain mix of personalities that are tolerable (cultural fit). The more critical someone is, the slightly more that people will tolerate in exchange for what they contribute. While I think that's true, I don't think it's scalable. You can get a startup off the ground with a team of 20 and a serious bro culture. But the bigger you get and the more touchpoints you have with the outside world, the more an inclusive company culture becomes an advantage. It's not as simple as saying inclusivity is necessary. It obviously isn't. After all, you can build large systems on architectures that scale poorly, too. But I do believe it's a long-term advantage.
- LinuxBender 8y ago
  Agreed. I believe that as companies get bigger, this behavior narrows down to specific orgs in the company. Dev teams and operations teams will each have their own filtered set of personalities too. Even then, I know I am over simplifying.
JohnBooty 8y ago
I personally like calm, rational logical inspirational leaders. I would like the fictional Captain Picard! Those are very hard to find. Great example! He was fictional, of course, but he was a good example of a leader who took no shit and held his crew to high standards, yet cared deeply for his crew and did not resort to petty rants. Although didn't he sleep with or almost sleep with Dr. Crusher? Maybe Linus shouldn't emulate that part.

Terretta 8y ago

> "A third category of people who are able to accomplish their goals by rallying others to their cause. They are essentially imposing their will on others, but are able to do it in a way that is not "rude." This is called charisma... does not necessarily imply dishonesty or trickery; arguably, the most charismatic people might be those that are true believers" I find it helpful to distinguish between charisma and presence. Charisma can be on the surface, think marketing. Pop biz lit tends to focus on this aspect. Presence comes from within, confidence from mastery grounded in centeredness and integrity. This distinction comes from Scouller's "The Three Levels of Leadership", 2011. See the synopsis on "Attitude towards others" here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_model#Personal_leadership https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_mod... Then the discussion on "Leadership Presence": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_model#Leadership_presence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_levels_of_leadership_mod...

yawboakye 8y ago

I'm finding it hard to think in these categories. The success of Linux is down to something Linus does and/or gets right. Even more fascinating, it might not be down to anything about him but the product he first created. So, anyone might claim "charisma" for getting the wall to be painted in their choice color but the painters just wanted a painted wall, and regardless of the attitude of the wall builder they were going to paint it.

greenhatman 8y ago
To me it seems that there is a weird kind of paradox. While Linus often say very mean things to people, most people I think still feel welcome regardless of it. He has also routinely said and explained that he wants work with everyone, regardless of whether he thinks they're playing fair or not. I'm referring here to his stance of not pursuing legal action against GPL infringers. He'd rather work on the relationship than write them off. This I think has been very important in driving Linux adoption and cooperation. This is something almost any leader probably would not have done. So I think we can be very grateful towards Linux for this. On the other hand, you get people who insist strongly on being nice, but are super quick to write off relationships or ban people from their organisations and projects when they're not following rules. This probably tends not to be great for the longevity of these projects.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Fri31Aug 8y ago

How does the charismatic reject people who want to join but who doesn't share the cause as (s)he understand it.