What I don't understand about Linus Torvalds is why everybody is so quick to justify and forgive what is obviously emotional abuse.
If he was shooting people that submitted buggy patches, would you say that was awesome? Obviously not. How is a less violent form of abuse suddenly great?
Lots of shitty solutions are highly effective. Relying on them is the lazy and uncaring way of dealing with your fellow humans.
Oh come on. Everyone is so fucking sensitive these days.
We now have psychological terms for every little emotion and behavior, but come on, put these into perspective.
Our grandparents would slap you in the face for calling this an abuse. Try sitting in a trench with tanks rolling by and bombs falling from the sky during WW2, at 18.
I could go on with examples of what 'emotional abuse' is, but I think you get my point.
The submitter fucked up and he got a slap on the wrist.
And it was good for the entire community.
The 'abused' submitter will probably triple check his commits and will be a better programmer as a result.
Everyone wins.
And what would have happened due to getting offended? Your leg would fall off? Your eyes would bleed? "Getting offended" is a purely cultural and personal issue. Somebody out there in the world is offended because you wear shorts, so what. Got to find your way to deal with it or confront it. Those online wambulance calls are ridiculous.
So as far as I'm concerned, the discussion is about "how to work
together DESPITE people being different". Not about trying to make
everybody please each other. Because I can pretty much guarantee that
I'll continue cursing. To me, the discussion would be about how to
work together despite these kinds of cultural differences, not about
"how do we make everybody nice and sing songs sound the campfire"
This statement is also emotional abuse. Emotional abuse creates psychological pain. Psychological pain creates physical pain. That is all that happens. It's a biological process.
Why is it a problem if I say that I would feel pain in response to somebody's words? This is just a fact I know about myself.
If you have psychological issues, you should consult a specialist. You can't put guilt on everybody who doesn't meet your rhetorical or substantial standards - even for the purely technical reason that this solution simply won't scale.
Feeling offended is a buzzword way too often abused for selfish and discriminatory reasons, so don't be surprised many people refuse to accept it as an argument, especially the ones comming from different cultural backgrounds where they weren't indoctrinated by a political correctness bubble.
Emotions are what they are. They are not negotiable, you can't make them go away, they are simply things that are there. If I hit you in the face, you would feel a bunch of different emotions. Who am I to tell you that these are not real things you are feeling?
Yes, I agree that stating an emotion isn't an argument, because it is a subjective truth.
> If I hit you in the face, you would feel a bunch of different emotions.
Yes... but even here, context matters.
I do martial arts, and when I get hit in the face while sparring, it's useful feedback and something I can learn from. If my training partners weren't willing to hit me occasionally, they'd be doing me a disservice.
I agree that context matters, but Linus isn't a sparring partner. Maybe a better analogy would be your martial arts teacher suddenly hitting you for wasting his time because you were lazy the last time you put back your equipment. If another student kicked you for complaining about this treatment, it would be normal to feel upset.
It's normal to have expectations about human behavior, and it's normal to get upset when they aren't met. It's actually healthy to expect our superiors to treat us with civility when we screw up. We expect that from the cops, for example. If your underlings are continually screwing up, this generally indicates a problem with your process. It's similarly healthy to expect colleagues, friends, and partners to support us when an authority has misused their power.
> Our grandparents would slap you in the face for calling this an abuse. Try sitting in a trench with tanks rolling by and bombs falling from the sky during WW2, at 18
I've sometimes wondered if a case could be made that a society needs an occasional war to put things in perspective.
A couple years ago, I read about a poll that was conducted before elections in some European country (I don't remember which) that found that a large fraction of young people though that the most important issue to them was that candidates would make it easier for them to download free music. This beat issues like unemployment, government corruption, getting out of recession, climate change, the environment, the tensions between immigrants and natives in their country, and their country's participation in things like the war in Afghanistan.
You know, there is a theory, that kids growing in sterile environments have really shitty imune sistems and prone to all kinds of ilnesses.
I think the same goes for the emotional environment and we are starting to see the results of this, I'd call it "knee-jerk ethics". It works like this: there is a list of words, which are triggers, and the default action: to feel "offended". Whatever that means. Why is it bad? Because it "outsources" ethics, removes emphaty and understanding and messes up semantics. Astonishing number of people are quick to yell "rasist", "sexist" at anything even remotely related to race of sex, no matter the context and the amount of real rasism or sexism (which my be zero).
If anything and everything offends and abuses you, well, go cry in the corner.
Hey now--some words are in the linguistic toolkit precisely because they create offense. I would almost call it "fiat offense"--there's nothing offensive about these words, beyond the fact that we, as a culture, have agreed to react in an offended manner to them.† They can thus be used to "color" your language to make any statement seem offensive and lower-status, when that is your goal.
† The proof of this being that different cultures choose wildly different things to be offended about; nobody in America thinks "bloody" or "tabarnac" are offensive, even though we understand exactly the concepts to which the words refer.
Indeed, in fact in English it is interesting to note that words of Germanic origin are more likely to be viewed as crass than words of French origin. The word infernal in English is almost never considered rude, but the word hell(ish) can be, obviously not as much these days as it used to be. To really see this effect in motion go have a look at what the middle English equivalent of the word vagina is.
Being rational while delivering an emotive message almost always sanitises and diminishes its impact. In fact that quite often is the point. If you want / need to bare your fangs you might as well be honest about it. If Linus was indiscriminately being verbally forthright you might have a case; "offensive" words exist for a reason, Linus for the most part uses them wisely. Personally I'd much rather that people were honest and swore at me than be polite and backstab me. Sometimes the way to be most honest with people is to swear at them.
All Linus had to say was something along the lines of, "I lost 5 hours of my time because you didn't test compile your code. I trusted you to do this. I'm angry about the wasted time and breach of trust, so in future you need to test compile your code or I'm going to stop trusting you."
"Your commit broke the build because it contained something you knew was probably not okay. This is costing us money because it wastes everyone's time. If you do it again I'm going to have to revoke some privileges, because it's my responsibility as CEO to keep us afloat. Is there anything I don't understand about what happened so we can prevent this from happening again?"
This is hypothetical of course, a less severe response may be called for, and obviously it would be more of a conversation. It isn't nice and friendly, but it isn't abusive either.
That's something you would say to a young child who has not yet learned to tell right from wrong, not yet learned to consider the consequences of his actions, and has not yet learned to act considerately toward others. It is belittling to speak to an adult that way. I would find that far more abusive than simply being sworn at for committing an act of stupidity.
If I got a Linus style dressing down, I would be embarrassed. But I would not feel like I was being treated like a child. I'd feel that I'm being shown respect--it would mean he believes that I do have the knowledge and skill to do it right, and that I just for some reason was a complete idiot in this case, and so all he has to do is let me know just how much it annoyed him and I can take it from there. I would acknowledge that he was right, I was a fucking idiot, and make sure it did not happen again. We'd then both move on, with my only fear being that if I ever receive an award or am given a going away party when I retire or something like that where people might get up and tell embarrassing stories about me, I've given them one more.
And here's a rewrite that is shorter, conveys the same information, isn't patronizing, and avoids the "sins" (quotes because we apparently disagree) of the original:
I'm unwilling to discuss this further. The first rule of kernel maintenance is that if a change breaks userland, it's a kernel bug, full stop. WE DO NOT BREAK USERSPACE.
Additionally, commit f0ed2ce840b3 is incorrect. ENOENT isn't a valid ioctl return and never has been. ENOENT is reserved for path operations. ioctl works on descriptors and not paths; the use of ENOENT in this commit is incoherent.
It appears that this same kernel bug has broken all the KDE media applications. As a result, I must apply the fix directly and immediately myself.
Your incorrect patch which broke userspace combined with the confusion you caused by blaming the breakage on some external program is frustrating, and I expect not to have to deal with similar problems in the future.
The two problems I see with the original are:
(1) It's pointlessly emotional to its own detriment ("shut the fuck up" actually carries less information than "I'm unwilling to discuss this further", because "shut the fuck up" lacks finality) --- and is in this regard written in a way that only Linus Torvalds or someone of his status could get away with. It actually diminishes Torvalds --- as does any tirade in which someone simultaneously uses the words "insane", "idiocy", "crap", "fucking", and then... "seriously". No, really, he really means it!
(2) It calls its target names (idiot, incompetent) and does so publicly in front of the whole team, which speaks to a management style driven more by fear than by a shared understanding of goals.
Honestly I don't care how Linus Torvalds manages the Linux kernel, but as a case study for how to manage a development team, this is interesting, more so because you (among the very most level-headed of HN commenters) appear to approve of it!
I like your rewrite, at least compared to the original. It's still furiously angry, which may or may not be appropriate for whatever situation, but it isn't abusive.
"What do you think of Linus' management skills?" would be an interesting interview question.
I had honestly never considered the idea that it could be seen as condescending to express anger while taking pains not to humiliate the other person. At least I think that's what you're saying. Maybe there's another way to say it without the abuse?
In a boss-employee relationship, the boss is not your friend, so they are an authority figure, much like a parent is an authority figure to a child. So it could be in the nature of the relationship. I wouldn't talk to a friend or coworker like that, I do see how that would be condescending.
Well it doesn't bother me nearly as much if it's not directed at me - I just feel bad for the recipient. If it is directed at me I pick my battles, and often just tolerate it. I'm not personally upset by Linus, I just find it strange that people speak so highly of his behavior.
Sometimes you need to escalate the consequences - otherwise groups just fall apart.
It is not easy to lead a group. I used to be the object of similar attacks by a leader that I believe were unjust (because I believe that technically I was right) - but I still think that leaders sometimes have to use this power.
If he was shooting people that submitted buggy patches, would you say that was awesome? Obviously not. How is a less violent form of abuse suddenly great?
Lots of shitty solutions are highly effective. Relying on them is the lazy and uncaring way of dealing with your fellow humans.