In practice there are always people, a minority, who can't or won't separate criticism of their work from criticism of themselves regardless Sure, ab

In practice there are always people, a minority, who can't or won't separate criticism of their work from criticism of themselves regardless Sure, absolutely. But consider the topic at hand. We're talking about Linus referring to people and/or their work as "brain dead" and things like that. It really doesn't take one of your snowflakes to take something like that personally. There are a lot of times (in sports as well as software development) when I've received harsh feedback and been 100% fine with it. But it's not always appropriate.