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Linux Kernel Dev Sarah Sharp Quits, Citing 'Brutal' Communications Style
JG0LD writes: A prominent Linux kernel developer announced today in a blog post that she would step down from her direct work in the kernel community. “My current work on userspace graphics enabling may require me to send an occasional quirks kernel patch, but I know I will spend at least a day dreading the potential toxic background radiation of interacting with the kernel community before I send anything,” Sharp wrote. Back in July, 2013 Sarah made a push to make the Linux Kernel Development Mailing List a more civil place.
This is one of those things that needs context.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Everyone who gets involved in kernel development (male, female or other) finds the whole process utterly brutal and gets the shit kicked out of them at some stage. While not all that nice sometimes it at least does ensure that ideas and code passes the mustard.
I'm a man and I don't like when guys feels it's ok to be bullying me.
Being nice is not so difficult.
The link from "back in July" was from 2013, and Sarah hasn't made a kernel contribution in 18 months. She's moved on to other projects, and I wish her the best of luck.
in the *very* early days (0.9x), and back then Linus never seemed like much of a dick, but then again, at the time he was still a student. Even met him face-to-face a couple of times. I stepped away due to the huge time commitments required by my regular job, not because of any issues I had with anyone.
The stories I hear leave me scratching my head. This isn't the Linus I knew back in the day. I guess all the fame and all of that must have gone to his head.
No true Scotsman argument.
Lots of men are put off by the same BS behavior, the difference is that there is more pressure to conform / suck it up, etc. Company I know removed a manager who had this style and the team was composed solely of males in a male dominated profession. Environment was getting toxic so instead of allowing the department to fail upper management took action and probably saved the company.
Reminds me of the old phrase about being able to dish it out all day but not being able to take it for one second.
Kind of reminds me of the whole Ellen Pao debacle where she accused people who worked with -- at a VC firm -- of being complete assholes. And she was right about that part. However, she lost the case because the facts showed that she was one of the biggest assholes in the whole place so she might as well have sued herself.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
What a load of stereotypical bollocks. I'm a man, and I don't accept or give abuse at work. If someone is rubbish, I'll tell them politely and professionally what they need to change, and if they continue to be rubbish, I'll fire them. Most of the women I have worked with seem to have the same sense of humour, skin-thickness and social skills as the men. i.e. if you are flat out rude and abusive, they get upset.
There is no need for for abusive leadership styles, irrespective of whether the team members or male or female.
I'm a man and I think this is a shit way to treat a human being. No, it's not okay to treat me that way just because I have "outdoor plumbing". I'm not your bro. We're not going to bro down at the bar after you berate me.
This is a part of nerd culture that we need to not quietly condone any longer.
You're making crude generalizations on the basis of gender. I dare say that borderline bullying isn't a healthy environment for a lot of men or women; it's immature and unprofessional and, as Sarah Sharp eloquently points out in her post, by tolerating such a culture the leaders of the community in question are prioritising the "need" for people to express themselves aggressively over other people's potential need for respectful and sensitive communication.
It's all very well to say that people need to learn not to take things personally, but the fact is that you can't possibly know - especially not over a mailing list - just what emotional or personal issues a person might be going through. Do you really a want a situation where curious and potentially talented developers are put off contributing to an important project because of a toxic culture?
Also, women need to lighten the fuck up.
So, by default you assume the "man's perspective" is better than the "woman's perspective"? Interesting.
Also, as a man... grow up.
Men are blunt to each and will call you out on your bullshit to your face.
Women, on the other hand, will do it behind your back and will be far more vindictive about it.
That is the real difference.
I don't like to be bullied either, therefore I don't allow people to do it. You have to take accountability for yourself. If the person is being a bully, call them out.
Get your PostgreSQL here: http://www.commandprompt.com/
This isn't empowering women. This is arguing that they are weaker than men far more profoundly than any MRA red piller gamer gater misogynist could ever hope to accomplish.
Welcome to the game of power dynamics! If you call them out, will they make your life difficult? If you call them out, will they physically attack you? If you call them out, will they use their authority to subtly destroy your life or career? The answer to all these questions is "I don't know!"
If that's your opinion, you're not much of a man.
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Would you treat coworkers like that? In meatspace? If someone called me a fuckwad in a way that wasn't obviously jokey/ironic it would be a huge problem to me. Being nice and civil is a much better way to get things done. Like, grumpy/curmudgeonly is kinda par for the course but that's totally different.
I used to work with a really toxic dev that for whatever reason our management dept protected. He was extremely misogynistic and refused to work with any women. One time in a meeting he said something basically like "it's in the spec, you stupid bitch" (as an aside, it wasn't in the spec ;p). He used to get away with yelling at people etc. Then I got sucked into the daily meetings and said basically "there is no call to raise your voice in a meeting at work. if you have a personal problem with me, we can go outside and talk about it". Never had a problem with him after that - unsurprisingly most misogynists and bullies are in reality cowards.
It took a hell of a lot of digging, but it seems to have started with this thread, way back in 2013.
Now, I'm all for professional communication, and emails can be easy to misinterpret, but this looks like a bit of an over-reaction. Someone commented that they send patches to Greg KH because Linus scares him, but added a winkey smiley afterwards, i.e. not really all that scary. Then Linus made a joke about Greg being big and squishing people that may or may not be playful or insulting, without knowing much about the relationship between these guys it's hard to say. Squish is hardly a word you use when you're really angry though.
And then Linus and Ingo gently tick off Greg and says he should be tougher, Linus says Greg is acting like a "door mat" and says "You may need to learn to say no to people". Ingo says "be frank with contributors and sometimes swear a bit". Probably this discussion would be held off list in a more traditional corporate environment to avoid embarrassing Greg (though "you are too nice" is not that embarrassing), but he takes it in his stride and agrees to be tougher.
OK, so far, just another day in open source land? Well, then Sarah Sharp flies off the handle and says:
What the heck? The only thing she could be referring to this thread so far has been Linus talking about Greg being a giant who might "squish you without even noticing". Nobody could seriously interpret that as advocating for violence unless you were so unbelievably literal you'd be unable to handle ordinary conversations.
And then there's the conflation of "verbal abuse" with "violence". These are two words that mean very different things. And finally the assertion that by trying to make jokes (perhaps not very well), Linus and Ingo were being unprofessional. Not surprisingly, Linus had a problem with this claim.
Now I don't know, probably this could have been avoided if the discussion with Greg had been private. But it seems Sharp would have let rip at some other point if someone else made an off-colour joke. I can believe LKML is a tough environment, but this isn't the best evidence possible. Perhaps there have been other incidents, but as Sharp doesn't list any, it's hard to say.
You know, if in my place work work I had to put up with "You're being a fuckwad. Don't do this." my response is going to come down to "why do I have to listen to whiny little children not capable of communicating like adults?" I'm sorry, but in the real world there is an expectation people will act like grown ups. In fact, there's probably an HR department and some labor laws which say you are required to act like grownups. Your ass will be out on the street if you act like this.
This whole bullshit of women should just suck it up because that's how the world works? Guess what, in the real world ... like corporations where people have jobs ... there isn't this anywhere but self entitled assholes on the internet.
The Linux developers might think they live in a microcosm where acting like a childish asshole is commonplace. But it's important to realize this has NOTHING to do with pretty much anything else. That the internet is full of assholes doesn't mean in real corporations with real people with real jobs get away with acting like this.
Trash talk is NOT how things happen in the real world. And a bunch of self entitled idiots claiming acting like self entitled idiots is normal doesn't make it true.
The fact that there's no adult supervision and people keep believing they can act like out of control high school students is the problem here.
If you haven't already learned to interact with people in a civil manner, the get out of your mother's basement, and learn that shit like this will get you fired from a real job. Working on the Linux kernel is not free license to be a major asshole and a social halfwit.
So maybe the problem is the idiots who think this is a problem with women. Because you sure as hell wouldn't expect to get away with this in any corporate setting; not even a little bit.
Seriously, people, grow the hell up. You likely already have people enforcing some degree of civility on you, because pretty much no organization is going to put up with this shit.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It's not even about being nice, necessarily. Why the fuck would you throw away the moral high ground without getting anything in return first?
There's a time for shouting, and there's times for civil discourse. Off the top of my head, things like life and death situations would qualify for heated responses. A mailing list for a kernel? Nothing but pure ego stroking.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
I was curious and did some research on this. I know Linus and some of the other guys can be a lot to take. However, after reading a lot of the posts Sarah made complaining about people and things, I started to get the feeling she's attention seeking and disruptive. She constantly brings up gender in irrelevant ways and appears to be the self styled 'girl kernel developer'. She also punches below the belt. For example:
"*Snort*. Perhaps we haven't interacted very often, but I have never seen you be nice in person at KS. Well, there was that one time you came to me and very quietly explained you had a problem with your USB 3.0 ports, but you came off as "scared to talk to a girl kernel developer" more than "I'm trying to be polite"."
Linus tends to be very direct, as are a lot of important open source communities. The critical people are very busy and get frustrated when people display various kinds of incompetence. In fact, it appears to me that they were treating Sarah very gently precisely *because* she was a girl. Or maybe it was the intel.com email adress -- who knows.
Professional behavior doesn't differ by gender. Even the words should be the same.
I never have to treat the women I work with differently because of their 'emotional state' or any gender issue.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Because if you want me to "act professional", I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearign a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what "acting professionally" results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
No they don't. Feminism presents it as a battle between male space or a female space. It's a false dichotomy. The hypocrisy is that feminists expect men to take the 'chivalrous' route and modify their interaction styles for women, yet asking women to reciprocate with some toughness and objectivity is 'oppressive' or 'misogynistic.' The net result is that men are driven out of areas where women have gotten their PC 'safe spaces' for their interaction and thinking styles because men do not do well there. Just ask a male nurse. Fighting discrimination with discrimination is not a solution.
I'm a fan of what works for a given environment and given group of people. The individuals making up the bulk of the effort are the ones who decide the culture simply because they are the most productive. Anything else would drive these productive individuals out and weaken the result. Linus and his lieutenants are far more productive than sarah sharp is, and she is not happy with the interaction style they set, so she goes. No big loss. She's welcome to either adapt to that or work on a different project. If her viewpoint is truly superior and her politics in line with reality, it should be a no brainer to fork the kernel and demonstrate this. The best contributors would flock to her and, in time, her branch would be the technically superior one. She should be showing us 'misogynists' how it's done instead of whining and stirring up shitstorms.
Feminism (and the social justice crowd in general) hate the idea of judging on merit and performance.
Some random quick google searches. Note how they contort the language and definitions..
http://mediadiversified.org/20...
http://geekfeminism.org/2009/1...
This has also infected academia. It's no surprise a lot of people with sarah sharp's attitudes have come out of the university system.
http://www.ucop.edu/academic-p...
I don't, I prefer "I don't appreciate your behaviour". Years ago I left Usenet because I noticed that the abrasive attitude was very easy to pick up (I certainly have played my ugly part) and in most IT related groups. It's also the reason why I don't contribute to any open source project. No idea if it's IT specific because I have friends who are biologists and I don't see that attitude between them. Maybe I don't know them well enough, I only see them a few days now and then during field trips. But each time it's like a fresh breath of air compared to the IT attitude.
Perl Programmer for hire
And a lot of men, myself included are put off by the sort of hostile work environment PC nazis create, where you have to say bullshit like "this is less than ideal." rather than "this is garbage." or "the fuck is this." to avoid offending people. It's especially bad when you're on the receiving end of this new PC form of disapproval, because many times you can't even tell if someone is praising or admonishing you, and you end up feeling like you're doing a shit job even when your boss is telling you everything is ok; and sometimes you are.
I'd rather be told, "jee what you've done is fucking bad." than say "well, we'll have to rethink this approach." and I'm left wondering, wtf does he/she mean by this? This hasn't happened to me, but getting fired after six months of never being told you've fucked up or done anything wrong must be brutal.
Now, I get there is some wiggle room, and you can be just as expressive and direct without resorting to swearing or simile, like instead of saying "this software is fucking garbage", saying "this software is bad, wrong and unfit for purpose." but you need to be direct and confrontational so that people know where they stand, rather than pretending to be polite when they are 5 minutes from being fired.
But you don't have to be a douchebag to get your message across tersely and efficiently.
Replace the italicized part with "unprofessional" to see what we can do differently to avoid problems.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
You don't even have to win the fight, you just have to hurt them, and they will leave you alone in the future.
I knew a girl who was bullied by some other girls in school. One day she fought back, and landed a good punch. Two days later she was gone because they ganged up on her, set her hair on fire and burned her with cigarettes. Her parents drove her to another school after that.
bullies are usually cowards.
Except when they're not cowards, outweigh you, and have a lot of friends. This is not uncommon.
I know more than a few guys who were bullied. Some fought back, sometimes it worked. As often as not though, it didn't help one iota, and if anything just made it worse.
The football quarterback prom king dating the lead cheerleader who throws the best parties? Half the school worships him, including the teachers? He can be a bully too. I wouldn't count on the idea that landing a couple good punches on him is going to make life better for his victim.
Would this be news if it were Samuel Sharp posting this and quitting?
... the leaders of the community are prioritising the "need" for people to express themselves aggressively over other people's potential need for respectful and sensitive communication.
Yup, that's right. It's their communication style and it has worked well for them for years. If people with 'sensitive needs' want to participate, they should have to toughen up, or fork the code and show those mean bastards the superiority of 'sensitive' interaction styles. Sharp has no right to impose her expectations on them. They've made it clear they don't respect whiners who can't handle harsh criticism for mistakes, and what does she do? Whine. What a joke.
It's all very well to say that people need to learn not to take things personally, but the fact is that you can't possibly know - especially not over a mailing list - just what emotional or personal issues a person might be going through. Do you really a want a situation where curious and potentially talented developers are put off contributing to an important project because of a toxic culture?
It doesn't matter how talented the person is if those emotional problems prevent rational acceptance of criticism, especially if the person is now in a critical role. Linus gets a lot of flack for his bluntness, but he really only lets loose when someone in such a role fucks up big time. One individual's (or group's) toxic culture is another's productive environment. The only way to change the culture is to compete and outpace it with superior productivity. In the case of the kernel, she should fork it and start her own team to show linus and friends how it's done.
And yet she's perfectly willing to mock, abuse, and deride people on her own turf where she's the one in charge. This is just another case of hypocrisy from top to bottom. She wants to be an "equal" but she also wants everyone to bend over backwards to accomodate her and treat her gently. She talks about things being "toxic" but is toxic herself to anyone she disagrees with... when she's the one holding all the cards.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
You're making crude generalizations on the basis of gender. I dare say that borderline bullying isn't a healthy environment for a lot of men or women; it's immature and unprofessional and, as Sarah Sharp eloquently points out in her post, by tolerating such a culture the leaders of the community in question are prioritising the "need" for people to express themselves aggressively over other people's potential need for respectful and sensitive communication. It's all very well to say that people need to learn not to take things personally, but the fact is that you can't possibly know - especially not over a mailing list - just what emotional or personal issues a person might be going through. Do you really a want a situation where curious and potentially talented developers are put off contributing to an important project because of a toxic culture?
What struck me about what she was trying to do, and I've seen others try to do the same thing, is to equate some comment or comments on a mailing list, or other post, as "violence". When I grew up we learned that "Sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me." That is, they're just words, they are not fists or knives or guns. It's not "violence" to berate someone or use colorful language or anything else. It may "offend" you, but taking offense at something someone says is entirely subjective, and impossible to enforce, because you end up with "speech codes", banning words, and other asinine restrictions until everything is a euphemism or metaphor until no one knows what anyone is talking about any more.
Bullying used to mean you're getting physically intimidated, punched, kicked, assaulted or robbed regularly. Now it seems it's enough that someone said something that hurt your feelings. And people can get their feelings hurt by things that are totally NOT intended that way by the speaker, just because of the listener's history or viewpoint.
Equating speech to physical violence is a very dangerous trend that will not end well.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
What I have a problem with is people like [the GP], who try to pretend that we're all the same. We're not. Not only are men not the same as women, men are not the same as other men, and women are not the same as other women.
Strawman. That's not what the GP said. What s/he actually said was this:
Professional behavior doesn't differ by gender. Even the words should be the same.
No, we're not all the same, and arguably it's impossible for us to pretend that we are. Nevertheless, there are many contexts where it is crucial that we do acknowledge we are the same, such as professional courtesies, voting rights, and so on.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
Terse, yes. Contains the word "fuckwad", no. Personal insults are neither professional nor efficient.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Yes, contributions will correlate with aggressiveness more than skill or ability. The code and quality will suffer, and eventually be extinguished.
Learn to love Alaska
Professional behavior doesn't differ by gender. Even the words should be the same.
I never have to treat the women I work with differently because of their 'emotional state' or any gender issue.
I suggest that this is true because you instinctively treat people well and act in a professional manner. You may in fact be treating men and women differently without thinking that you are.
But the point is not that it's a problem, but that it's right. You're treating people as they would like to be treated. You're being considerate. You're keeping things on a professional, respectful plane.
If everyone did that, on both "sides" (as if there should even be "sides"), there would be few issues. And more productive work would definitely get done because the workplace would present a desirable environment conducive to doing work instead of having the destructive distraction of dealing with problem people.
To quote Linus about "professional"
Because if you want me to 'act professional,' I can tell you that I'm not interested. I'm sitting in my home office wearing a bathrobe. The same way I'm not going to start wearing ties, I'm *also* not going to buy into the fake politeness, the lying, the office politics and backstabbing, the passive aggressiveness, and the buzzwords. Because THAT is what 'acting professionally' results in: people resort to all kinds of really nasty things because they are forced to act out their normal urges in unnatural ways.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Is Linux successful? Debatable. It has success in limited uses,
These limited uses being "pretty much everything outside the desktop".
Servers, embed, high performance computing clusters, smartphones, robots, home appliances, etc.
And new uses still pop up on a regular basis.
Hardly a niche.
Though you probably are proud of explicitely using a non-Linux OS on your computer (Mac OS X ? Windows ?), fact is that you probably interact with a dozen of Linux powered device each day without noticing.
Linus accomplished a lot, but what groundbreaking thing has he done in the last 20 years?
Yeah, the guy has done nothing more that the Linux kernel in he's life. He's a one trick poney.
It's not like he would be ablto to do anything else like starting a distributed source control management (DSCM) that in practice almost replace any other SCM.
Oh, wait...
Without Linus to create Git, you probably wouldn't have had communities like GitHub emerge nowadays (or they would have tried to built on much less optimal technology. Github is born out of the specific feature that with git, forks/merges/rebases are cheap - a specific feature that Linus needed to build in order to be able to use git for the kernel work).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
So it's political correctness gone awry merely because you can't say "this is garbage" or "the fuck is this"? Holy crap you are one messed up AC. This isn't political correctness, this is basic interpersonal interaction developed over thousands of years. If you need to get along with someone and work as a team, you can not bully them or insult them or it will end badly. When you are at work it is no longer about YOU, it is about your coworkers, your company, getting the work done, etc.
Just practice this. Say "this looks like a bug" instead of saying "this looks like shit". It gets to the point of it being about solving the problem instead of it being a power play. The only reason you want people to know where they stand is because you're treating the workplace as a competition to see who can come out on top as the alpha dog. Stop treating it like a competition and start cooperating. If you can't, then there are anger management classes you can sign up for before you are the one who gets fired.
This is not a "men vs women" thing, it's an "asshole vs decent person" thing independent of gender.
Speak for yourself! Stop trying to validate your shortcomings by foisting them on all geeks. Plenty of geeks are not competitive, work well in teams, and are not rude. You being socially maladjusted does not mean we all are.
you are not a geek , you sir are an asshat.
technical skill doesnt allow you to be horrible to people, neither does other people being horrible to you .
being horrible to people makes you a horrible person.
you allways have a choice how you deal with people , so be nice and you meet nice people and will become a nice person
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