4 ms·

Linux: Don't get me started on “executives”

97 points by cassepipe 6y ago

user3939382 6y ago
This probably needs a better title (currently— Linux: Dont get me started on “executives”). Maybe, “Linux Needs Executives to Increase Priority of Bugfix Development”. As it stands the title doesn’t give the reader much of a clue about what the post is about.
- cassepipe 6y ago
  Ooops. I thought editorializing was bad so I just reposted the link as I saw it on tuxrurls.com and added Linux in front of it to give context. I agree it would have deserved a better title. My bad.
lorenzfx 6y ago
As a non-native speaker, I always found the term "executive" for managers somewhat strange. Why call someone who doesn't actually execute anything "executive"?
- umanwizard 6y ago
  There is probably some explanation, but I don’t think the etymology is any more transparent to native speakers than it is to you. It’s just one of those words whose meaning has drifted over time.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    The modern sense of executive seems to be originally a US thing related to the executive branch of government. Which does indeed carry out laws and policies but also, especially in more modern times, is the branch of government that's most "in charge."
- e1g 6y ago
  The label is used as a parallel to the "executive functions" of the brain. This layer control the behavior of the overall organism: it selects goals, and monitors behaviors required to attain those goals. This describes the intended role of (upper) management inside a complex interdependent organism that is a business with 1,000+ independent brains working on it.
- protomyth 6y ago
  Ah, you are missing the key thought that they do the execution by getting all the cogs in the machine to move.
  - chris_wot 6y ago
    It’s quite possible that they move the cogs in opposing directions, jamming up the machine.
    - protomyth 6y ago
      Sadly, that seems to happen more often than it should. They also remove cogs for no reason.
- geocar 6y ago
  An executive isn't the same as a manager, but decide what the business shall do (and then do it/execute it; usually this means hiring people though). They are accountable only to the owners of the business and legislation (and maybe only the latter if they are also the owner). An executive doesn't have to be a manager, for example the programming CTO who has no employees and writes all the code themselves. A manager can also be an executive, for example the CEO who manages their direct reports. A manager might not be an executive, for example, if their boss is another manager
  - froh42 6y ago
    It's managers all the way down.
    - geocar 6y ago
      Sometimes yes: If those managers are managing vendors (or other business relationships). Confusingly some companies use "executive" to refer to their lowest positions, since they "do" as well. I hope it's clear I'm not talking about that.
- rkangel 6y ago
  My interpretation is that these are the group of people who "execute" the will of the board. The board are the ones who set the direction of the company, but then the Executive Officers of the company are the ones who execute that.
qotgalaxy 6y ago
I think we've cracked general AI if an operating system is being quoted on the front page of HN.
zxzax 6y ago
I'm not a kernel developer so I don't understand the details of this part: >People forget that only a few years ago have we decided that the kernel now has to protect userspace programs from malicious hardware. That's a major shift in thinking, now data that we used to blindly trust can not be trusted at all. How come this wasn't being done already? Wouldn't you want drivers to do safety checks on everything, in case of a hardware failure? Or does this refer to something else, besides safety checks?
- dboreham 6y ago
  Malicious and failed at not the same thing.
  - zxzax 6y ago
    So does that mean there is a significant difference between, for example, a malicious USB device versus a damaged USB device, from the kernel point of view? It seems that both would be sending incorrect data that the kernel should catch, right?
    - yetihehe 6y ago
      damaged device - sends some random data and prevents link from working, could cause BSOD malicious device - will send dma requests to read memory and then to send it to some other server or will implant some malicious software in memory or inside other devices.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  Probably due to the rise in cloud. Where people run software on hardware which is totally abstracted away from the end consumer.
- zaphar 6y ago
  If you blindly trust hardware then on potential attack vector is malicious hardware. This used to be known as the Evil Maid attack. If a bad actor get's access to your hardware the thinking goes then all bets are off. And what happens when a significant portion of your hardware is built in a country known to be a bad actor? Well maybe the kernel should start treating the hardware as potential attack vectors now.
lnsru 6y ago
I am in the same situation. The features were implemented and all the executives were happy. Now the product reached the customers and all I do is support and bug fixing instead of implementing nice-to-have things. Executives love to ignore all costs during the whole product lifecycle. I am not surprised here at all.
- CivBase 6y ago
  I run into this problem all the time at my work. The company loves to fund new solutions to our problems, but those solutions never pay out because the company has no plan or funding to maintain the solution once the MVP has been developed and released. Our process is built on a pile of abandonware.
geocar 6y ago
The fact is: It's not our money. Oh for sure, I can spend millions of dollars just by saying I believe it will deliver tens more to the company. If I'm right, I'll get a fat bonus, and if I'm wrong (too much), they'll fire me. But If I say we need to send millions of dollars or else we'll run into an amorphous risk that might make us look bad, how possibly can the board evaluate my claim? Or put another way, if I said I had a tiger-detecting t-shirt that made noise when a tiger about to strike, would you believe me? It is really hard to invest in something that benefits anyone other than the company, and harder still if it benefits someone else more. Basically it needs to be your money, or clearly cost-of-sales to make that kind of decision, so while I think I can empathise with the rant, I'm not sure what I (or any executive, really) could do about it.
protomyth 6y ago
Interestingly, non-profits tend to have the same problem with general fund funding. People will donate food or buildings (which is great), but it is actually hard to get money to pay the utilities. In-kind on grants helps but is often shrunk for reasons of "getting more money to do the objective". Paying technical debt or utilities is not sexy and a lot of people want their name attached to cool new things not keeping the lights on.
- bluehatbrit 6y ago
  This is a such an understated problem with non-profits and charities. In the UK (not sure about other countries) it's pretty common for people to give money to a charity which is ring-fenced for a particular thing. Legally the charity then can't use that money for anything else. No one wants to fund the general running of a charity, they'd rather fund a specific event or programme. That causes so much overhead on accounting to ensure those funds go to the right projects and figuring out how to pay the water and electric bills. People don't realise that it actually costs more money on accounting to give ring-fenced money like that. I imagine similar is true towards things like the linux kernel with development efforts.
  - rkangel 6y ago
    You inevitably need to fundraise for something, because it's the emotive stuff that helps you fundraise. You can be careful about your fundraising though to make sure that it isn't quite as restrictive as it needs to be. My favourite story here is "Scrunchy the cat". Scrunchy was a cat in one of the UK cat charities (Cat's Protection?) who needed a hip operation. Management were very clear "if you raise money for this, make sure it's not restricted to just Scrunchy". Inevitably the fund raisers ignored this completely and ended up raising enough money for Scrunchy to have 20 hip operations and the money couldn't be used for anything else. Scrunchy had her hip operation, and then for a few years afterwards any cat in the Cat's Protection who needed the same operation was renamed Scrunchy!
- zachlatta 6y ago
  I run a nonprofit and we have a policy that we only accept unrestricted funds to allow us to operate at maximum efficiency and impact. There is a large and not often talked about principle agent problem that restricted donations create, in addition to the additional overhead. We make our finances 100% transparent so the people we serve, donors, and the public can hold us accountable. Our open finances are at https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/ https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/. Main homepage at https://hackclub.com https://hackclub.com / open source at https://github.com/hackclub/hackclub https://github.com/hackclub/hackclub
leeter 6y ago
In my experience the executives want what the sales folks want. What the sales folks want is features, preferably features that work half the time so they can include a support contract on top of the license. So they can fix bugs and get paid for it but only the ones for a specific paying customer. They don't care if the overall thing is dying for lack of investment, they just want a signing because that's what their bonus is based off of.
diegocg 6y ago
This is the case for pretty much every open source project. See eg. Openssl. Since open source can be used for free, there is very little incentive to change the current situation. And with non copy left licences it can be even worse. The only realistic way to fix these problems I can imagine is to force companies to use paid distros, and let these companies hire developers. But it has been historically hard to make people pay for distro support. Red Hat and Suse were successful, but they never got big enough. It's too easy to use their products for free, or use alternatives like Debian.
spacemanmatt 6y ago
In PostgreSQL community, the most successful patches follow a pattern sorta like this: * Email the hackers list about intentions, ensure you aren't overlooking obvious things. The more core maintainers know and understand what you're doing the more likely you are to be met with critical support. (Hopefully this part is obvious!) * Code patch: Prepare the work surface: clean up, refactor, debug, extend, whatever it takes to facilitate easy integration of upcoming feature patches, but preserves existing functionality. The code is internally pretty clean but not necessarily primed to go the direction you want. * Code patches: Plan diffs for human review and validation: Scope and volume matter! Your additions join existing development; plan to maintain your additions against a moving codebase throughout the integration process.
- spacemanmatt 6y ago
  And the more I think about what I wrote, I don't think it scales to the kernel. I'd love to be wrong.

97 points by cassepipe 6y ago

This probably needs a better title (currently— Linux: Dont get me started on “executives”). Maybe, “Linux Needs Executives to Increase Priority of Bugfix Development”. As it stands the title doesn’t give the reader much of a clue about what the post is about.

cassepipe 6y ago
Ooops. I thought editorializing was bad so I just reposted the link as I saw it on tuxrurls.com and added Linux in front of it to give context. I agree it would have deserved a better title. My bad.

lorenzfx 6y ago

As a non-native speaker, I always found the term "executive" for managers somewhat strange. Why call someone who doesn't actually execute anything "executive"?

umanwizard 6y ago
There is probably some explanation, but I don’t think the etymology is any more transparent to native speakers than it is to you. It’s just one of those words whose meaning has drifted over time.
- ghaff 6y ago
  The modern sense of executive seems to be originally a US thing related to the executive branch of government. Which does indeed carry out laws and policies but also, especially in more modern times, is the branch of government that's most "in charge."
e1g 6y ago
The label is used as a parallel to the "executive functions" of the brain. This layer control the behavior of the overall organism: it selects goals, and monitors behaviors required to attain those goals. This describes the intended role of (upper) management inside a complex interdependent organism that is a business with 1,000+ independent brains working on it.
protomyth 6y ago
Ah, you are missing the key thought that they do the execution by getting all the cogs in the machine to move.
- chris_wot 6y ago
  It’s quite possible that they move the cogs in opposing directions, jamming up the machine.
  - protomyth 6y ago
    Sadly, that seems to happen more often than it should. They also remove cogs for no reason.
geocar 6y ago
An executive isn't the same as a manager, but decide what the business shall do (and then do it/execute it; usually this means hiring people though). They are accountable only to the owners of the business and legislation (and maybe only the latter if they are also the owner). An executive doesn't have to be a manager, for example the programming CTO who has no employees and writes all the code themselves. A manager can also be an executive, for example the CEO who manages their direct reports. A manager might not be an executive, for example, if their boss is another manager
- froh42 6y ago
  It's managers all the way down.
  - geocar 6y ago
    Sometimes yes: If those managers are managing vendors (or other business relationships). Confusingly some companies use "executive" to refer to their lowest positions, since they "do" as well. I hope it's clear I'm not talking about that.
rkangel 6y ago
My interpretation is that these are the group of people who "execute" the will of the board. The board are the ones who set the direction of the company, but then the Executive Officers of the company are the ones who execute that.

qotgalaxy 6y ago

I think we've cracked general AI if an operating system is being quoted on the front page of HN.

zxzax 6y ago

I'm not a kernel developer so I don't understand the details of this part: >People forget that only a few years ago have we decided that the kernel now has to protect userspace programs from malicious hardware. That's a major shift in thinking, now data that we used to blindly trust can not be trusted at all. How come this wasn't being done already? Wouldn't you want drivers to do safety checks on everything, in case of a hardware failure? Or does this refer to something else, besides safety checks?

dboreham 6y ago
Malicious and failed at not the same thing.
- zxzax 6y ago
  So does that mean there is a significant difference between, for example, a malicious USB device versus a damaged USB device, from the kernel point of view? It seems that both would be sending incorrect data that the kernel should catch, right?
  - yetihehe 6y ago
    damaged device - sends some random data and prevents link from working, could cause BSOD malicious device - will send dma requests to read memory and then to send it to some other server or will implant some malicious software in memory or inside other devices.
Jonnax 6y ago
Probably due to the rise in cloud. Where people run software on hardware which is totally abstracted away from the end consumer.
zaphar 6y ago
If you blindly trust hardware then on potential attack vector is malicious hardware. This used to be known as the Evil Maid attack. If a bad actor get's access to your hardware the thinking goes then all bets are off. And what happens when a significant portion of your hardware is built in a country known to be a bad actor? Well maybe the kernel should start treating the hardware as potential attack vectors now.

lnsru 6y ago

I am in the same situation. The features were implemented and all the executives were happy. Now the product reached the customers and all I do is support and bug fixing instead of implementing nice-to-have things. Executives love to ignore all costs during the whole product lifecycle. I am not surprised here at all.

CivBase 6y ago
I run into this problem all the time at my work. The company loves to fund new solutions to our problems, but those solutions never pay out because the company has no plan or funding to maintain the solution once the MVP has been developed and released. Our process is built on a pile of abandonware.

geocar 6y ago

The fact is: It's not our money. Oh for sure, I can spend millions of dollars just by saying I believe it will deliver tens more to the company. If I'm right, I'll get a fat bonus, and if I'm wrong (too much), they'll fire me. But If I say we need to send millions of dollars or else we'll run into an amorphous risk that might make us look bad, how possibly can the board evaluate my claim? Or put another way, if I said I had a tiger-detecting t-shirt that made noise when a tiger about to strike, would you believe me? It is really hard to invest in something that benefits anyone other than the company, and harder still if it benefits someone else more. Basically it needs to be your money, or clearly cost-of-sales to make that kind of decision, so while I think I can empathise with the rant, I'm not sure what I (or any executive, really) could do about it.

protomyth 6y ago

Interestingly, non-profits tend to have the same problem with general fund funding. People will donate food or buildings (which is great), but it is actually hard to get money to pay the utilities. In-kind on grants helps but is often shrunk for reasons of "getting more money to do the objective". Paying technical debt or utilities is not sexy and a lot of people want their name attached to cool new things not keeping the lights on.

bluehatbrit 6y ago
This is a such an understated problem with non-profits and charities. In the UK (not sure about other countries) it's pretty common for people to give money to a charity which is ring-fenced for a particular thing. Legally the charity then can't use that money for anything else. No one wants to fund the general running of a charity, they'd rather fund a specific event or programme. That causes so much overhead on accounting to ensure those funds go to the right projects and figuring out how to pay the water and electric bills. People don't realise that it actually costs more money on accounting to give ring-fenced money like that. I imagine similar is true towards things like the linux kernel with development efforts.
- rkangel 6y ago
  You inevitably need to fundraise for something, because it's the emotive stuff that helps you fundraise. You can be careful about your fundraising though to make sure that it isn't quite as restrictive as it needs to be. My favourite story here is "Scrunchy the cat". Scrunchy was a cat in one of the UK cat charities (Cat's Protection?) who needed a hip operation. Management were very clear "if you raise money for this, make sure it's not restricted to just Scrunchy". Inevitably the fund raisers ignored this completely and ended up raising enough money for Scrunchy to have 20 hip operations and the money couldn't be used for anything else. Scrunchy had her hip operation, and then for a few years afterwards any cat in the Cat's Protection who needed the same operation was renamed Scrunchy!
zachlatta 6y ago
I run a nonprofit and we have a policy that we only accept unrestricted funds to allow us to operate at maximum efficiency and impact. There is a large and not often talked about principle agent problem that restricted donations create, in addition to the additional overhead. We make our finances 100% transparent so the people we serve, donors, and the public can hold us accountable. Our open finances are at https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/ https://bank.hackclub.com/hq/. Main homepage at https://hackclub.com https://hackclub.com / open source at https://github.com/hackclub/hackclub https://github.com/hackclub/hackclub

leeter 6y ago

In my experience the executives want what the sales folks want. What the sales folks want is features, preferably features that work half the time so they can include a support contract on top of the license. So they can fix bugs and get paid for it but only the ones for a specific paying customer. They don't care if the overall thing is dying for lack of investment, they just want a signing because that's what their bonus is based off of.

diegocg 6y ago

This is the case for pretty much every open source project. See eg. Openssl. Since open source can be used for free, there is very little incentive to change the current situation. And with non copy left licences it can be even worse. The only realistic way to fix these problems I can imagine is to force companies to use paid distros, and let these companies hire developers. But it has been historically hard to make people pay for distro support. Red Hat and Suse were successful, but they never got big enough. It's too easy to use their products for free, or use alternatives like Debian.

spacemanmatt 6y ago

In PostgreSQL community, the most successful patches follow a pattern sorta like this: * Email the hackers list about intentions, ensure you aren't overlooking obvious things. The more core maintainers know and understand what you're doing the more likely you are to be met with critical support. (Hopefully this part is obvious!) * Code patch: Prepare the work surface: clean up, refactor, debug, extend, whatever it takes to facilitate easy integration of upcoming feature patches, but preserves existing functionality. The code is internally pretty clean but not necessarily primed to go the direction you want. * Code patches: Plan diffs for human review and validation: Scope and volume matter! Your additions join existing development; plan to maintain your additions against a moving codebase throughout the integration process.

spacemanmatt 6y ago
And the more I think about what I wrote, I don't think it scales to the kernel. I'd love to be wrong.