<story><title>Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off</title><url>https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CA+55aFy+Hv9O5citAawS+mVZO+ywCKd9NQ2wxUmGsz9ZJzqgJQ@mail.gmail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggreer</author><text>I totally agree with this. I actually quit my job at Red Hat because of the culture of non-criticism. I kept getting in trouble for pushing back against stupid decisions, even though I never insulted a single person.&lt;p&gt;For example: When the design team added 10MB of web fonts to the app, I said something like, &amp;quot;Users don&amp;#x27;t care whether the font is Open Sans or Arial. They care whether things load quickly and don&amp;#x27;t re-flow. This is a bad decision.&amp;quot; I got nothing but condemnation for pointing this out. Today, every user downloads several megabytes of web fonts which have broken kerning and hinting on some platforms.[1]&lt;p&gt;It was a similar story when people wanted to change our build artifact to be based on RHEL instead of Alpine Linux.[2] This would have bloated the build artifact from 11MB to 200MB, introduced a host of security concerns, and drastically increased CI build times. In a meeting I said, &amp;quot;This decision seems totally braindead.&amp;quot; I was immediately taken aside and given a stern talking-to by my manager. If that&amp;#x27;s not a braindead decision, then I don&amp;#x27;t know what is.&lt;p&gt;I also got in trouble for this comment[3] pointing out flaws in PatternFly. I was told that some of my coworkers felt insulted by my comment, and that I should be more civil and tactful. Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting? I never got answers to those questions.&lt;p&gt;Encouraging civility sounds like a good thing, but in my experience the people leading the charge are doing it to suppress criticism.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;3&lt;/a&gt; My bullet point about reducing the build artifact from 11.3MB to 7.6MB was incorrect. It actually reduced the build artifact from 40MB to 7.6MB.&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17163740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17163740&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Actually, it isn&amp;#x27;t. For example in today&amp;#x27;s environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say &amp;quot;this seems stupid to me&amp;quot; because it might hurt someone&amp;#x27;s feelings. So instead you walk it back and say things diplomatically (which is a tiny form of a white lie). Then people reply to your diplomatic statement with another diplomatic statement, and pretty soon nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all.&lt;p&gt;Have you been to a corporate meeting? It feels like soul death for precisely this reason -- &lt;i&gt;nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Tech&amp;#x2F;open-source was one of very few domains where people &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; say the thing they wanted to say. The culture selected for people who want to interact that way, and then encouraged that form of interaction.&lt;p&gt;Now that&amp;#x27;s dead. Codes of conduct, inclusion, and caring about people&amp;#x27;s feelings are lofty ideals, but if people can&amp;#x27;t say &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s a stupid idea&amp;quot; when they think &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s a stupid idea&amp;quot; the whole thing will disintegrate into a dilbertesque nightmare along with the rest of the corporate America.</text></item><item><author>grzm</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;”I&amp;#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day“&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a false dichotomy. There’s no need to be an asshole to not be a pushover.</text></item><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Same. Linus always called a spade a spade, and I always respected that. In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerably and people habitually hide their thoughts, I think this kind of attitude is &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; important, not less. People give up ability to say certain things in the name of inclusion, and then lose ability to think those things in the first place.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day, and most of us are pushovers.</text></item><item><author>serf</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude.&lt;p&gt;(to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn&amp;#x27;t do so he gave reasons for his conclusion.&lt;p&gt;in other words : his technical brilliance, in my own opinion, was a far larger boon than the problems stemming from having to deal with his knife-like personality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jogjayr</author><text>Effectively critiquing ideas without hurting feelings is a powerful skill, hard to master, and shouldn&amp;#x27;t be written off.&lt;p&gt;IME there are only 2 reliable ways to get people to do what you want: you have authority to tell them to do it, or you can convince them that it&amp;#x27;s the best course of action.&lt;p&gt;People often treat their ideas like their children - and calling someone&amp;#x27;s child &amp;quot;stupid&amp;quot;, or &amp;quot;braindead&amp;quot; isn&amp;#x27;t going to make you popular with them. Good luck convincing them it&amp;#x27;s a bad idea now - it&amp;#x27;s a matter of pride, and they&amp;#x27;ll obstruct you every way they can. Is this rational? No - but it&amp;#x27;s a reality of working with people, and denying it is futile. I&amp;#x27;ve done it myself in the past, without being aware of my biases, and even then I&amp;#x27;ll probably do it again in future.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re actually working with people (and those people&amp;#x27;s bosses) who can&amp;#x27;t be reasoned with using facts and data, presented without calling the idea names, then the rational thing to do (which, it seems, you did) is to find a different team or company. Either you&amp;#x27;re wrong or they are, and time will prove someone right.&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting?&lt;p&gt;I read the comment and my opinion is &amp;quot;It&amp;#x27;s a CSS framework! How can it take over a year to make?!&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;The speed and quality of development leaves much to be desired. For example: It took them five months to merge a TTY component. We wrote a similar component in two days.&amp;quot; might have been the insulting parts.&lt;p&gt;Those comments could be construed as calling those devs slow and incompetent. I don&amp;#x27;t know if that was your actual meaning, but it&amp;#x27;s hard for me to read it any other way - sorry :-( maybe I&amp;#x27;m missing some context.&lt;p&gt;Sorry also if any of what I said seemed rude. It took me years of insulting people to learn this stuff, and I&amp;#x27;m still nowhere near perfect :-), but I thought I should share - it&amp;#x27;s possible I&amp;#x27;m wrong. I also understand if you feel differently.&lt;p&gt;P.S. I checked out Floobits and it looks super-cool. I&amp;#x27;m looking forward to trying it out sometime.</text></comment>
<story><title>Linus Torvalds apologizes for his behavior, takes time off</title><url>https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/CA+55aFy+Hv9O5citAawS+mVZO+ywCKd9NQ2wxUmGsz9ZJzqgJQ@mail.gmail.com/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ggreer</author><text>I totally agree with this. I actually quit my job at Red Hat because of the culture of non-criticism. I kept getting in trouble for pushing back against stupid decisions, even though I never insulted a single person.&lt;p&gt;For example: When the design team added 10MB of web fonts to the app, I said something like, &amp;quot;Users don&amp;#x27;t care whether the font is Open Sans or Arial. They care whether things load quickly and don&amp;#x27;t re-flow. This is a bad decision.&amp;quot; I got nothing but condemnation for pointing this out. Today, every user downloads several megabytes of web fonts which have broken kerning and hinting on some platforms.[1]&lt;p&gt;It was a similar story when people wanted to change our build artifact to be based on RHEL instead of Alpine Linux.[2] This would have bloated the build artifact from 11MB to 200MB, introduced a host of security concerns, and drastically increased CI build times. In a meeting I said, &amp;quot;This decision seems totally braindead.&amp;quot; I was immediately taken aside and given a stern talking-to by my manager. If that&amp;#x27;s not a braindead decision, then I don&amp;#x27;t know what is.&lt;p&gt;I also got in trouble for this comment[3] pointing out flaws in PatternFly. I was told that some of my coworkers felt insulted by my comment, and that I should be more civil and tactful. Who was insulted? What parts of the comment were insulting? I never got answers to those questions.&lt;p&gt;Encouraging civility sounds like a good thing, but in my experience the people leading the charge are doing it to suppress criticism.&lt;p&gt;1. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;3&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;3&lt;/a&gt; My bullet point about reducing the build artifact from 11.3MB to 7.6MB was incorrect. It actually reduced the build artifact from 40MB to 7.6MB.&lt;p&gt;2. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;12&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;github.com&amp;#x2F;openshift&amp;#x2F;console&amp;#x2F;pull&amp;#x2F;12&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;3. &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17163740&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=17163740&lt;/a&gt;</text></item><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Actually, it isn&amp;#x27;t. For example in today&amp;#x27;s environment when someone suggests something stupid, it is no longer acceptable to say &amp;quot;this seems stupid to me&amp;quot; because it might hurt someone&amp;#x27;s feelings. So instead you walk it back and say things diplomatically (which is a tiny form of a white lie). Then people reply to your diplomatic statement with another diplomatic statement, and pretty soon nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all.&lt;p&gt;Have you been to a corporate meeting? It feels like soul death for precisely this reason -- &lt;i&gt;nobody is saying the thing they want to be saying at all&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;Tech&amp;#x2F;open-source was one of very few domains where people &lt;i&gt;did&lt;/i&gt; say the thing they wanted to say. The culture selected for people who want to interact that way, and then encouraged that form of interaction.&lt;p&gt;Now that&amp;#x27;s dead. Codes of conduct, inclusion, and caring about people&amp;#x27;s feelings are lofty ideals, but if people can&amp;#x27;t say &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s a stupid idea&amp;quot; when they think &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s a stupid idea&amp;quot; the whole thing will disintegrate into a dilbertesque nightmare along with the rest of the corporate America.</text></item><item><author>grzm</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;”I&amp;#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day“&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;This is a false dichotomy. There’s no need to be an asshole to not be a pushover.</text></item><item><author>coffeemug</author><text>Same. Linus always called a spade a spade, and I always respected that. In a culture where the Overton window has shrunk considerably and people habitually hide their thoughts, I think this kind of attitude is &lt;i&gt;more&lt;/i&gt; important, not less. People give up ability to say certain things in the name of inclusion, and then lose ability to think those things in the first place.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;ll take an asshole over a pushover any day, and most of us are pushovers.</text></item><item><author>serf</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m probably going to be alone in saying so, but I always enjoyed Linus and his attitude.&lt;p&gt;(to me) it made him appear honest and dedicated to (his own) goals, and I always felt like that was respectable. (mostly) whenever he was proven technically wrong about how to do something he would concede to the technically better solution, and if he didn&amp;#x27;t do so he gave reasons for his conclusion.&lt;p&gt;in other words : his technical brilliance, in my own opinion, was a far larger boon than the problems stemming from having to deal with his knife-like personality.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>noufalibrahim</author><text>A related point that occurred to me about the convenant which Torvalds has included is the &amp;quot;Scope&amp;quot; section. It looks like it leaves most of the details to the project maintainer which I suppose is a good thing. However, an explicit statement about where the whole thing doesn&amp;#x27;t apply would be useful.&lt;p&gt;If a person has a political or other opinion and is very strident about it in every sphere (twitter, personal blog, facebook etc.) outside of the project, the convenant should explicitly allow this. That way, it sounds more like a &amp;quot;this is our house and these are the rules you should follow if you want to enter&amp;quot; vs. &amp;quot;you should be a certain kind of person in all aspects of your life to be allowed in here&amp;quot;. The latter has too much overreach IMHO.</text></comment>