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That’s essentially a cliché false dichotomy. Wouldn’t it be even nicer to work with someone who can express how they feel in a constructive and helpful manner?
by matthewmacleod 8y ago
That’s essentially a cliché false dichotomy. Wouldn’t it be even nicer to work with someone who can express how they feel in a constructive and helpful manner?
- rooam-dev 8y agoSometimes "constructive" requires more effort, which for an engineer could mean "overhead". Especially if communication is text based (email, chat, etc.), it's more difficult to express your emotions. My imho of course.
- simias 8y agoAs far as I can tell Linus's feedback is almost always constructive in that it generally points out precisely why he thinks something should or shouldn't that way. The problem is that he sometimes splices personal attacks and uses an overly aggressive tone which doesn't really help anything. I can somewhat justify using a very corrosive tone if you're not in a place of power and you want to be sure that you're not ignored (I'm not a fan of it but pragmatically it sometimes gets the job done). However it's clearly not the case here, he has the power to reject any contribution he doesn't fancy. And his developer clout is huge enough that he'd still be heard if he criticized third party projects he doesn't maintain. From a purely pragmatic point of view I don't see what his corrosive tone gets him. Actually I can easily see what it cost him, some devs have resigned from their maintainer position in the Linux kernel and probably many more who gave up contributing at all because they were worried they were going to be shot in flight.
- eropple 8y agoYou are highlighting the false dichotomy that a lot of folks in this thread--and, if I'm being frank, not for good, decent, or ethical reasons--are piling in on. You can do something that makes people upset without being an asshole. It's really that simple. "No, I won't merge this pull request because of X, Y, and Z." Somebody's probably not going to be happy. But you have not needed to stoop to insulting them. You have not been an asshole. You have done your job, you have kept whatever level of high technical quality you care about. But you have not been an asshole. It is not hard to do both, and if you are but-forring Linus's decision to maybe be less of an asshole it's probably look-in-the-mirror time.
- matz1 8y agoIs it better to train myself to not be affected with insult ? If some one say to me "No, you stupid pile of sheet, I won't merge this pull request because of X, Y, and Z." I'll just ignore the insult part or at very least to not let myself negatively affected and move on.
- eropple 8y agoNo, it's not. It is better to respond coolly to assholish behavior. But it is not better to allow it to remain unchallenged. Not challenging assholish behavior means that it becomes a community norm and is then incumbent upon everybody else to "train" themselves, as you say, to ignore the behavior of a minority of assholes. It hands the responsibility of defining what the culture is to those assholes. Letting the assholes normalize the culture is bad. It decreases uptake. It increases, even if people "train" themselves, the likelihood of burnout and of departure. And it makes the world, even if incrementally, a worse place.
- matz1 8y agoIsn't is easier to change one person namely myself, rather than try to change one other person, let alone many? The culture and the world always evolving and changing, it can be worse or better or whatever, most importantly for me is how can I make myself adapt to the every situation and make the best of it.
- eropple 8y agoI don't care about "easier" and I don't think you should either. Why would "easier" be even on the radar? "Changing yourself" and letting rot fester is of little value to anyone. Be so mildly discomforted as to push back on other people's nasty behaviors and you make the world a better place. Do what is right.
- matz1 8y agoBecause is practical, obviously changing myself to adapt to every situation has value for me, it makes a world a better place for me. what is right is relative, this is what I think Right.
- 08-15 8y ago> From a purely pragmatic point of view I don't see what his corrosive tone gets him. I don't know whether it actually, but I think Linus becomes "corrosive" to get rid of someone. Certain developers disappearing is not a side effect, it's the intended effect. If you have a "contributor" who keeps submitting the same faulty patch over and over, who doesn't listen, but keeps making a fuss about his "contribution" not being accepted, what can you do? You tell him that his code is no good and won't be accepted, and you tell him that his making a fuss about it is not welcome. But he doesn't stop, so now what? Block him from the mailing list? He just comes back with a new address. What's next? You decide to be so unpleasant to him that he leaves. Anecdotally, this sequence happened with certain engineers at Redhat, who kept dumping their bad code at Linus so that it may be maintained upstream. They could have cleaned it up, but that's exactly the maintenance cost Redhat wanted to outsource to the community.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoThe problem is, it's not just the intended targets that go away with that behavior. A lot of spectators who see that decide they no longer wish to put themselves through that, and leave as well.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago> Sometimes "constructive" requires more effort Not typing insults saves time. We are not talking about psychologist-grade emotional communication, just basic manners.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cblades 8y agoNo doubt, but we're people talking to other people. We can afford that overhead, and neglecting it incurs down-stream costs that can be unpredictable and significant.
- UncleMeat 8y agoIt isn't overhead. It helps contributors improve.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoLinus wrote emails all day every day for 15 years and like once a year he'd go off on somebody. It's not a false dichotomy, because nobody's perfect. You're gonna have flaws, they're gonna come out on bad days, and at that point you've got a few options for what kinds of flaws you prefer.
- shrewduser 8y agohe has generated an veritable everest of writing and some people want to focus on a few of the rocks.
- stemc43 8y agoWhile everyone was spending their time learning how to be nice - this guy actually sat down and built something useful.
- catfish123 8y agoDoes it take hours to learn not to write "$people should be retroactively aborted"? Weeks?
- inawarminister 8y agoYears, lifetime. If it is so easy to force people to be polite, societies would already taken that low hanging fruit ages before* *Actually, they do in some societies, such as for example Japan, or my own native Java. People insult each other with more esoteric means instead.
- jlawson 8y agoLots of people don't have the cognitive ability to hit the perfect mixture of expressing every necessary criticism with sufficient force, without hurting any feelings more than absolutely necessary, without taking energy away from completing other tasks. It would be nice if we could find a person who was a world class 100x programmer AND project organizer AND had decades of sustained high productivity AND had absolutely perfect social skills. But in real life people like this are hard to find, so we have to deal with imperfect people. The question is: Which kind of imperfection do you prefer for this purpose? Someone who is technically weak? Disorganized? Can't stand the pressure of leading a massive organization? Can't sustain effort over time? Writes unnecessarily mean criticism that drives some people away? Writes too-soft criticism that fails to correct technical failings? Choose at least one.
- pseudalopex 8y agoLinus himself is saying he can and should do better.
- lsd5you 8y agoUnder duress. Let's not pretend it's some organic evolution in his personality, he has been pressured into this new position.
- Sharlin 8y agoSometimes you have to be nudged towards the right direction. But change comes from inside. You’re being rather insulting to Linus if you assume he’s just a pawn being moved from the outside here instead of moving on his own accord.
- s73v3r_ 8y agoIf you had someone who was technically deficient, would you just push them away, or would you push them to get better? Why not the same with someone who doesn't have the best interpersonal skills? Why shouldn't we push those people to get better?
- ravenstine 8y agoNot always. Some of the best feedback I've ever gotten was when I was told that what I wrote was "crap". What's not constructive about that feedback? When people use the word "constructive", what they actually mean is "nice" and "won't hurt my ego."
- sonnyblarney 8y ago"Not always. Some of the best feedback I've ever gotten was when I was told that what I wrote was "crap". What's not constructive about that feedback?" reply " No. Saying something is 'crap' may be true, but it's definitely not constructive. 'Constructive' feedback helps you understand why it's wrong. So, 'constructive' would be: "hey that code was very problematic, and here are the reasons why: etc. etc. etc.." "When people use the word "constructive", what they actually mean is "nice" and "won't hurt my ego."" No. Saying something is 'crap' is generally not useful and counterproductive. It's also subjective. You can say 'It doesn't work' or 'it doesn't meet requirements' and that's more objective.
- ravenstine 8y agoIt was constructive to me, anyhow. And certainly not counterproductive. Sometimes people need to be reminded just how badly they screwed up, and to purposely avoid offending people is pretending that some work isn't crap. Of course words like crap are subjective; to the person reviewing my work, my code was crap, and that actually means something to me if they think that it's crap. Not constructive? Nonsense. Sometimes you need language like "crap" to punctuate the issue. It got me to take the issue more seriously. If I tried to ship some really awful code, I don't need someone to tell me "Gee, Ravenstine, let's talk about this, m'kay? So this part of your code is... problematic." People the word "problematic" gets thrown around all the time, even when referring to very minor bugs in public projects. But words like "crap" actually mean something because they're reserved for times when you really need to know what you did was wrong. I'm irrational, as are all human beings. Not everything I do can be treated as an engineering puzzle with a fixed set of inputs that yield a deterministic return value. You can tell a human being that something "doesn't meet the requirements" like they're some kind of robot, but depending on who you're talking to, you may get the result you want by not talking to them like they're robots. This is definitely not to say that people should be uncivil, I find that sometimes a kick in the rear is very helpful.
- notyourday 8y agoDo you ever fire people who are nice and really trying?
- eropple 8y agoThe low emotional intelligence on display throughout this thread is both disappointing and unsurprising. I have fired "nice and really trying" people. Because they were decent people, I have also then recommended them to my personal network for positions that are better suited to their skills (and more than once have they gone on to success at a friend's company), because hiring somebody who can't do the job is management's fault. I also fire people who are toxic assholes. I do not recommend them to my network because I would not inflict them upon people I like. Even if they're competent. You can, in fact, do both, and hats off to Linus for at least making a goddamned attempt to not be the latter.
- notyourday 8y agoThank you for providing a glimpse into a mind bending gymnastics one might need to engage in to convince himself or herself that it is different somehow: this is actually why work references are absolutely useless - people love to coddle incompetence in order to be perceived as "nice bosses". If someone's being unable to do a job is management's fault ( in this case yours, since you are the manager of the person that you have fired ), then the person who needs to be fired should be the manager, not the person who cannot do the job.
- matthewmacleod 8y agoI have absolutely no idea how you can draw this conclusion. There is a pretty obvious difference between "giving feedback in a respectful, polite and constructive manner" and "giving feedback in an aggressive, disrespectful and unhelpful manner". The former isn't "coddling" – it's "being a decent human being". The problem I see is that too many people seem to confuse "having strong views and standing by them" with "being an unnecessary dick about it". You don't have to do the latter to achieve the former, and I'd argue that it is almost universally harmful.
- maxxxxx 8y agoSure. But in reality as a leader you sometimes have to be willing to piss off some people. You can't always be nice. Sometimes you have to draw a clear boundary.
- BeetleB 8y agoWow, you respond to a comment about false dichotomy by invoking the false dichotomy.
- davidcbc 8y agoWhat is the scenario where it is necessary for a leader to tell someone they should have been aborted?
- jbob2000 8y agoMy parents joke about that with my brother and I; "Dammit jbob, we should have aborted you!". Jokes like these require context and when you look at them from the outside, they look terrible. It's not "necessary", but then again, neither is 90% of human communication, my parents could have just said "You. Bad action. Fix." That seems to be what's missing from this whole SJW movement; context. These people watch from the sidelines, pick up on a few "trigger" words, and then burn your house down because they didn't understand the context of your comment.
- davidcbc 8y ago
- 08-15 8y agoImagine you are Linux and you receive a messy patch so poorly structured that you can't follow the logic of the code. As Tony Hoare used to put it, the kind of code that doesn't have obvious bugs, but isn't obviously free of bugs. What do you tell the submitter? You can't really point at specific problems, merely at a gut feeling that the mess must be hiding problems. Then the submitter shoots back: "You rejected my code just because I'm a paraplegic transsexual gay man of color!" Now what? How do you "express how [you] feel in a constructive and helpful manner?"
- aetimmes 8y agoYou do what you should have done in the first place and locate specific problems. If the code is too clever for you, ask them to refactor in a simpler way rather than rejecting outright.
- 08-15 8y agoWell, you ask for improvement and reject. You have to, because you don't want to accept it. That pisses the submitter off. What now? A possible alternative is to do what Pieter Hintjens recommended: Accept everything, wait for the community to clean it up. Somebody might outright revert the bad patch... you accept that reversion patch, too, because you don't judge, you accept everything. This approach supposedly worked well for Pieter, but 0MQ isn't nearly as big or as visible as Linux.
- BeetleB 8y ago>Well, you ask for improvement and reject. You have to, because you don't want to accept it. That pisses the submitter off. What now? The goal of better communication (in this case) is not to be the offensive asshole. It is not to ensure the other person isn't pissed off. I've pointed it out in earlier threads, but do try to read some good books on communication. While they do talk about phrases that lead to defensive behavior and how to avoid them, the focus is always on ensuring your perspective gets out, and i a way that is most likely to be heard. As one book said "Do not make a metric how upset the other person becomes. That is giving too much control to the other party, and you have limited control over their behavior".
- matz1 8y agosure but I can't realistically expect everyone to be nice, Isn't better for me to always try to prepare myself for the fact that anyone can be rude and unhelpful ?
- BeetleB 8y agoYes, but it is also unreasonable to expect everyone you professionally deal with to be that way. To be frank, it's unreasonable to even expect this at the team level. It's also completely orthogonal to whether it's OK for the team leader to be an asshole.
- matz1 8y agoI am not sure what you mean, yes it is unreasonable to expect everyone I professionally deal with to be that one way.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Arnt 8y agoOh, sure. It'd also be very nice to work in a 50% female developer team where everyone estimates correctly.