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Harnessing Conflict in the Workplace (video)
Nigel Dessau has written a book titled Become a 21st Century Executive: Breaking Away from the Pack. One thing he mentions both in his book and in conversation is that you should harness conflict in the workplace rather than try to stop it. And the first name that came to mind was Linus Torvalds, and how kernel developer Sarah Sharp recently quit the kernel development team loudly and publicly because of Linus's 'Brutal' Communications Style. And now the Washington Post has put out an article under the headline, Net of Insecurity: The Kernel of the Argument, which is about Linus's management style and his recent conflicts with almost every Internet security maven within reach of his online writing. Meanwhile, at ZDNet, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols calls the Post article "re-bundled old FUD about Linux and the internet's security."
Nigel likes Linus (as do most people who've met him in person) and points out that Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius. The same could be said about the late Steve Jobs and a number of other interesting leaders in the computer business. And Nigel's book and this interview also talk about something that may be more important in the long run than this year's small spate of Linux publicity, namely mentoring and how it can help millennials become productive workers in knowledge fields -- which a whole bunch of them need to start doing PDQ because all the baby boomers everybody loves to hate are either retired already or will be retired before long.
Nigel likes Linus (as do most people who've met him in person) and points out that Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius. The same could be said about the late Steve Jobs and a number of other interesting leaders in the computer business. And Nigel's book and this interview also talk about something that may be more important in the long run than this year's small spate of Linux publicity, namely mentoring and how it can help millennials become productive workers in knowledge fields -- which a whole bunch of them need to start doing PDQ because all the baby boomers everybody loves to hate are either retired already or will be retired before long.
I can't believe how many people these days think high school is a model of how life should be.
High school is what life is when people are too immature and self-absorbed to deal with reality.
FWIW if Linus or Jobs ever talked to you they'd either appreciate your attitude and speak to you with respect because of it - or, more likely, they would dissect your fragile ego, smash the chip off your shoulder and leave you to spend the next five years figuring out why you were such a waste of biological matter.
As others have pointed out here before, constructive conflict/disagreement in the workplace does not require acting like an asshole. If you read any of Sarah Sharp's comments on this matter, it is very clear that she had no problem at all with technical criticism or disagreement. Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks. The summary seems to just lump all of this together, suggesting that Linus telling people that they are worthless and should kill themselves is an example of productively harnessing "conflict in the workplace".
Also, from the summary: "...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius." Perhaps, but it could also be because he's in charge and has more power than anyone else on the project. There are plenty of really smart people who work on the Linux kernel, but most of them probably couldn't get away with the same kind of behavior because of their position in the power hierarchy. This further emphasizes why public, personal insults directed at subordinates are decidedly not an example of "harnessing workplace conflict" for productive ends.