5 ms·

I may be an average corporate backend dev, but if anyone I work with would react in this way after any kind of mistake I did, I would report the situation / lea

I may be an average corporate backend dev, but if anyone I work with would react in this way after any kind of mistake I did, I would report the situation / leave immediately. Honest feedback is surely key to keep quality, innovation, and skills high - the thread has indeed a few lines of honest feedback (don't break user-space, wrong error) and the rest are just insults. I am pretty sure it goes against the Code of Conduct [1] 1: https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-conduct.html https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/process/code-of-condu... EDIT: Just saw 2012, I guess CoC was not in place back then

asguy 5y ago
> I would report the situation / leave immediately. [...] I am pretty sure it goes against the Code of Conduct [1] Back in the early 90s, I was young and working for a startup. I had a fiery and seasoned boss, who knew what he was doing and had very little patience for bullshit. One day, I decided I knew better than him, and implemented a solution that was way outside the spec of what he had asked for. The next day, I came into the office, and he asked me what I had done. I gave him some snarky answer about coming up with a "better" solution. It turns out I had wasted a huge amount of people's time with my "solution" and it had become a giant pain in his ass. He screamed at me so intensely, that I swear I saw a new vein bulge out of his forehead. He then proceeded to kick a full-height metal filing cabinet so hard that he broke his foot. I went to the bathroom, collected myself, fixed the problem correctly, and we never spoke of it again. Would I have been better served with a PIP and a bunch of HR meetings to discuss my insubordination/personality problems? Probably not. In hindsight he did me a huge favor straightening me out. We're still friends to this day. Sure, the new world of kindler/gentler CoCs sounds nice, but sometimes it takes hard people (with thick skin) to get the job done. Sometimes people just need to be told to shut the fuck up.
- midrus 5y ago
  Well, nowadays I know (because I worked for) so many SF companies with people that would create an scandal in HR just because the catered food had too much salt or there wasn't a vegan alternative. I can't even imagine anyone doing this nowadays
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jimmyvalmer 5y ago
  My foot still smarts to this day. I miss the days office workers could keep a whiskey cabinet and work things out hermano to hermano. Peace brutha.
- WalterGR 5y ago
  There is space between breaking your foot while kicking a filing cabinet and formal review processes. I’ve been straightened out, for example, by a reasonable explanation of what I did wrong.
  - asguy 5y ago
    Maybe you didn't screw up as bad as I did? Maybe the stakes weren't as high? Who knows,. it's all about context. Blanket bans on behavior ignore that context.
Nextgrid 5y ago
This kind of behavior is obviously extreme and I agree with you if it comes as a surprise but I'd argue that Linus' short temper is a known fact and something you sign up for by getting involved in kernel development, not to mention I doubt any of this is actually personal. IMO the modern trend of CoCs everywhere swung the pendulum way too much the other way in favour of attention-seekers who intentionally find things to get offended about and cause drama.
max002 5y ago
And what about all users that got their code fucked up? Yeah, that return statement was just a joke. Goes aggainst all good practices of programming.
400thecat 5y ago
Imagine you are a safety officer, and you see a worker committing huge safety violation, and thereby putting in danger his coworker's lives. Which of the following ways has better chance of teaching him the gravity of the situation, and preventing this error repeated in the future: a) kindly point his error to him in a nice and friendly way. b) give him a verbal beatdown with insults and head-shaking
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  I wonder what HN would think about this guy's account of his medical school experience. https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medschoolhell.com/archives/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch... https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medschoolhell.com/2005/12/29/pimptastic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medsch...
loudtieblahblah 5y ago
Open source was never supposed to be corporate. That was the beauty of it. Now it's no different than developing Windows, just kore complicated and distributed
forthedayrate 5y ago
Linus had a reputation for doing this, back in the day. He took some time off a few years ago, and while he's still very strict on quality, his tone has changed. I've run a lot of dev teams, and I see two side to this. On the one side, the worse thing you can do is build an environment where folks are scared to raise new ideas, or think of new solutions, for fear of being publicly humiliated. At best, you will get teams that do very average work. At worse, you'll loose all your good people. On the other side, I've had devs who thought they were god's gift for code, and made everyone's life around them, a misery. e.g. one guy spent months failing to implement an API with the front end he was writing, but despite that, he'd comment on PR's "This code is shit and needs to be rewritten." Folks like that need to be part of, what we call in the UK, a frank and open conversation, which I had one to one. This particular dev refused to back down, and left without working his notice. Going somewhere where they would, in his view, thank him for his feedback. Good luck with that. They guy that replaced him had the API working inside of a week. tbf, the API was terrible, but that's a whole other story involving IBM and SaleForce...

asguy 5y ago

> I would report the situation / leave immediately. [...] I am pretty sure it goes against the Code of Conduct [1] Back in the early 90s, I was young and working for a startup. I had a fiery and seasoned boss, who knew what he was doing and had very little patience for bullshit. One day, I decided I knew better than him, and implemented a solution that was way outside the spec of what he had asked for. The next day, I came into the office, and he asked me what I had done. I gave him some snarky answer about coming up with a "better" solution. It turns out I had wasted a huge amount of people's time with my "solution" and it had become a giant pain in his ass. He screamed at me so intensely, that I swear I saw a new vein bulge out of his forehead. He then proceeded to kick a full-height metal filing cabinet so hard that he broke his foot. I went to the bathroom, collected myself, fixed the problem correctly, and we never spoke of it again. Would I have been better served with a PIP and a bunch of HR meetings to discuss my insubordination/personality problems? Probably not. In hindsight he did me a huge favor straightening me out. We're still friends to this day. Sure, the new world of kindler/gentler CoCs sounds nice, but sometimes it takes hard people (with thick skin) to get the job done. Sometimes people just need to be told to shut the fuck up.

midrus 5y ago
Well, nowadays I know (because I worked for) so many SF companies with people that would create an scandal in HR just because the catered food had too much salt or there wasn't a vegan alternative. I can't even imagine anyone doing this nowadays
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
My foot still smarts to this day. I miss the days office workers could keep a whiskey cabinet and work things out hermano to hermano. Peace brutha.
WalterGR 5y ago
There is space between breaking your foot while kicking a filing cabinet and formal review processes. I’ve been straightened out, for example, by a reasonable explanation of what I did wrong.
- asguy 5y ago
  Maybe you didn't screw up as bad as I did? Maybe the stakes weren't as high? Who knows,. it's all about context. Blanket bans on behavior ignore that context.

Nextgrid 5y ago

This kind of behavior is obviously extreme and I agree with you if it comes as a surprise but I'd argue that Linus' short temper is a known fact and something you sign up for by getting involved in kernel development, not to mention I doubt any of this is actually personal. IMO the modern trend of CoCs everywhere swung the pendulum way too much the other way in favour of attention-seekers who intentionally find things to get offended about and cause drama.

max002 5y ago

And what about all users that got their code fucked up? Yeah, that return statement was just a joke. Goes aggainst all good practices of programming.

400thecat 5y ago

Imagine you are a safety officer, and you see a worker committing huge safety violation, and thereby putting in danger his coworker's lives. Which of the following ways has better chance of teaching him the gravity of the situation, and preventing this error repeated in the future: a) kindly point his error to him in a nice and friendly way. b) give him a verbal beatdown with insults and head-shaking

matheusmoreira 5y ago
I wonder what HN would think about this guy's account of his medical school experience. https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medschoolhell.com/archives/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch... https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medschoolhell.com/2005/12/29/pimptastic/ https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medsch...

loudtieblahblah 5y ago

Open source was never supposed to be corporate. That was the beauty of it. Now it's no different than developing Windows, just kore complicated and distributed

forthedayrate 5y ago

Linus had a reputation for doing this, back in the day. He took some time off a few years ago, and while he's still very strict on quality, his tone has changed. I've run a lot of dev teams, and I see two side to this. On the one side, the worse thing you can do is build an environment where folks are scared to raise new ideas, or think of new solutions, for fear of being publicly humiliated. At best, you will get teams that do very average work. At worse, you'll loose all your good people. On the other side, I've had devs who thought they were god's gift for code, and made everyone's life around them, a misery. e.g. one guy spent months failing to implement an API with the front end he was writing, but despite that, he'd comment on PR's "This code is shit and needs to be rewritten." Folks like that need to be part of, what we call in the UK, a frank and open conversation, which I had one to one. This particular dev refused to back down, and left without working his notice. Going somewhere where they would, in his view, thank him for his feedback. Good luck with that. They guy that replaced him had the API working inside of a week. tbf, the API was terrible, but that's a whole other story involving IBM and SaleForce...