At first I thought "I am glad he is back to his old outspoken self", then I saw it is from 2012. (Don't actually now what he is like these days, just remember he did publicly repent some time ago).
I haven't been following lately, but last "outburst" I had noticed was two or three years ago. It was pretty mild compared to this, but used some harsh language - nothing at all profane, IIRC he still used terms like "idiot," "trash," and the like.
People still had a fit, saying he'll never change.
One of the first rule of written communication for me: never send an email when angry. You can write it as a sort of catharsis but then just delete it and wait a few minutes/hours/days to cool down. You will realize what is important. And for the guy being yelled at here, it was being the maintainer of one of the coolest project on earth.
Just to be clear this is not a justification of Linus' behavior. I just believe that responding to inappropriate behavior with inappropriate behavior is a lose/lose proposition.
Mauro is really nice. I worked briefly with him when I contributed a patch for the ZBar barcode reader. It was the best experience I had contributing to free and open source software. I'm really thankful for his work.
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]
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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...
In one side of my mind, I agree with others that such behavior is unprofessional. Then I remember, this is pretty much his project, it may have grown in great leaps but it still started out as his personal project and he gave rules for working on it which were broken.
This isn't really relevant to bring up in 2022. But this thread always brings a huge grin to my face.
I'm probably one of the few that really likes watching the "Steve Jobs" level of product quality, just blast across the internet at all expenses. Because it helps me feel better about what passes for quality in a lot of my day to day.
It brings me hope to see that level of passion over reliability. There's a time and place for that, but yeah, things happen.
(Unfortunately I have to flag this post for relevance, because 10-year old threads are not exactly meeting the quality for content we want on HN!)
You’re definitely not alone in enjoying seeing something like this. I would probably hate being on the receiving end personally, but I’m glad that this kind of sheer passion for quality exists in the world.
At times I've admired Linus's tendency to not sugar coat things. Sometimes things need to be said bluntly. In this case, however, despite being correct, his message would have been stronger without all of the personal insults.
While the maintainer submitted a patch that was clearly the wrong approach, it's a bit ironic that the one who needed to fix their approach to kernel programming was actually Linus. I can't imagine how awful it must have felt to be at the receiving end of feedback like that.
I'm glad that there is now a Code of Conduct and that Linus has started to work on fixing his approach.
This isn't directed at you at all, but "don't sugar coat it" may be my least favorite phrase in English. I get the theory, but, personally speaking, I have nigh exclusively seen it used to excuse aggressive negative emotion, rather than to encourage direct and honest communication.
While might be necessary, doing such a dress down in public seems unnecessarily hostile and counterproductive, especially in the context of voluntary work. I know Linus is/was known to do this, but I never found it “cute”.
Linus is my god :) dont like it? Switch off all your servers :) and as anyone he has right to be pissed off from time to time. From what ive read its not first time.
So youre nice 1 time, then 2nd time, then 3rd... And well then you loose your patience.
Dont take it personally, just shut up and fix that shit xD
But, nevertheless, I don't know the full context. Linus might have repeatedly emphasize "We do not break userspace" to the point he is red-faced in this particular incident.
Having a bad commit to a project you are responsible for, with a large number of users, is frustrating. Not to mention that Linux is not just a responsibility, but a life-work. What should he do instead of this? Block bad commit author from contributing to Linux forever?
A programmer blaming the user for the programmer's mistake is not less callous of an action. Probably better or worse, because it is wrapped with courteous words, which imply that the programmer is right. What if this happens on a mission critical machine that deals with life-and-death situation? Whose head is gonna end up in the masses' pitchfork?
I've been in both end, the incompetent contributor and the project owner who feels there is not enough competencies in the room. I'm sure there are many others who still have to deal with this dynamic. "We do not break userspace" may be old story, but the dynamic between is still relevant to this day and there is a lot to learn from the incident.
48 comments
[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 103 ms ] threadNo matter how right or wrong either party is, it takes some serious levelheadedness to respond like that.
Just to be clear this is not a justification of Linus' behavior. I just believe that responding to inappropriate behavior with inappropriate behavior is a lose/lose proposition.
Wise words! This is my philosophy as well (having learnt it the hard way).
https://github.com/mchehab/zbar/pull/64
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-condu...
EDIT: Just saw 2012, I guess CoC was not in place back then
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.
I’ve been straightened out, for example, by a reasonable explanation of what I did wrong.
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.
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
https://web.archive.org/web/20101218031844/http://www.medsch...
https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180021/http://www.medsch...
Now it's no different than developing Windows, just kore complicated and distributed
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...
Just let it be water under the bridge.
But even so, why can't we still call him out on his callous and offense delivery? There are better ways of saying what he said in his post.
You don't have to be an asshole to be direct. You can still be respectful.
I'm probably one of the few that really likes watching the "Steve Jobs" level of product quality, just blast across the internet at all expenses. Because it helps me feel better about what passes for quality in a lot of my day to day.
It brings me hope to see that level of passion over reliability. There's a time and place for that, but yeah, things happen.
(Unfortunately I have to flag this post for relevance, because 10-year old threads are not exactly meeting the quality for content we want on HN!)
At times I've admired Linus's tendency to not sugar coat things. Sometimes things need to be said bluntly. In this case, however, despite being correct, his message would have been stronger without all of the personal insults.
While the maintainer submitted a patch that was clearly the wrong approach, it's a bit ironic that the one who needed to fix their approach to kernel programming was actually Linus. I can't imagine how awful it must have felt to be at the receiving end of feedback like that.
I'm glad that there is now a Code of Conduct and that Linus has started to work on fixing his approach.
So youre nice 1 time, then 2nd time, then 3rd... And well then you loose your patience.
Dont take it personally, just shut up and fix that shit xD
Because this is how we get nice things.
You may not like it. I certainly prefer a nicer mode of communication. But this is peak infrastructure maintenance.
Compare and contrast:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29845724
they come from this level of passion for perfection
But, nevertheless, I don't know the full context. Linus might have repeatedly emphasize "We do not break userspace" to the point he is red-faced in this particular incident.
Having a bad commit to a project you are responsible for, with a large number of users, is frustrating. Not to mention that Linux is not just a responsibility, but a life-work. What should he do instead of this? Block bad commit author from contributing to Linux forever?
A programmer blaming the user for the programmer's mistake is not less callous of an action. Probably better or worse, because it is wrapped with courteous words, which imply that the programmer is right. What if this happens on a mission critical machine that deals with life-and-death situation? Whose head is gonna end up in the masses' pitchfork?
I've been in both end, the incompetent contributor and the project owner who feels there is not enough competencies in the room. I'm sure there are many others who still have to deal with this dynamic. "We do not break userspace" may be old story, but the dynamic between is still relevant to this day and there is a lot to learn from the incident.