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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.
>> 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
Or...you could hire Gen X (in their 30's-50's)
Nobody needs people like Nigel Dessau. What do they actually do? Nothing. They write books and run their mouth about subjects they know ZERO about. What does this guy know about actually producing something like the Linux kernel? NOTHING. The fact that Slashdot gives these idiots a place to spew their garbage is a sign of how far this site has fallen.
Oh you millenials... Conflict does not have to be brutality, nobody is advocating you work for someone who pours human feces on you every morning.
The fact is you are in competition. By all means generational stereotypes are somewhat bunk, but not totally and you'll be competing with baby boomers and Gen-Xers for a long time. Imagining yourself a special snowflake won't be conducive to said competition.
basic human dignity as per your post.
Hear, hear. Conflict is one thing. But we have a nation that seems to think that conflict is wonderful, magnificent, and something to strive for all the time; continuous sarcasm, bickering, backbiting, evilness. You can disagree and not be uncivilized. As for the boomers retiring and millennials - what on earth does conflict have to do with that?
Be careful. Your "basic human dignity" is another person's "you're being an asshole." We all have our thresholds, but I've been astounded at the sensitivity many of my co-workers for what I would consider benign things.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I don't know and I don't care. If I wanted to waste my time on videos, I'd watch something more interesting than a talking head.
Also "And Nigel's book (and this interview) also talk about something that may be more important in the long run than this small spate of Linux publicity". But probably not.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Versions of Linux have proved vulnerable to serious bugs in recent years. AshleyMadison.com, the Web site that facilitates extramarital affairs and suffered an embarrassing data breach in July, was reportedly running Linux on its servers, as do many companies.. Those problems did not involve the kernel itself, but experts say the kernel has become a popular target for hackers building “botnets,” giant networks of computers that can be organized to initiate cyberattacks.
People in AshleyMadison.com also were reading Washington Post .. their hack was not related to this fact but many experts say badly edited newspapers become a popular and easy target for populists.
*Divide and Conquer*
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
How about the conflict from trying to get a union up and running.
I mean I don't doubt that he may be very smart, but is he actually a genius?
And since when does being a genius somehow give one a free pass on being "prickly"? If anything, I think any forgiveness in that area which may be offered by the public would have more to do with what a person is known for, and how much they have actually done than it would to do with the person's intelligence.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Skype sucks^H^H^H^H^H is sub-optimal for doing an interview
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
I would never want to work for them. I much prefer my current work environment where no one yells at eachother and everyone is friendly and apologizes sincerely when they screw up.
Trust me, I have worked at places where everyone yells at each other, has fights in the office (as opposed to disagreements behind closed doors) etc, and I wouldn't trade my current work environment for more money in those organizations.
A dick who is a genius is still a dick. The archetypal "house" type character. Do you want to be a genius alone and alienated?, because that's what happens when you treat people like shit.
What a "genius" anyway? those people in the apple store at the mall, right? Maybe apple can copyright that term so no one can ever refer to themselves as a genius again.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
If it gets too bad, the workers there can always harness the conflict all their coworkers have with management, to strike some kind of better deal.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Exactly. Most people feel this way too, which is why Jobs never got anyone to work for him very long and his company went under. Oh wait...
Well Apple is designed from the ground up for followers.
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.
...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius. The same could be said about the late Steve Jobs...
You are comparing Linus to Steve Jobs? Disowning your child is not "prickly", it is a few less letters.
So, a priest, a rabbi and an SJW walk into a bar...
You are welcome on my lawn.
What the fuck, people? We're 27 comments in to a story about "conflict in the workplace" and nobody's mentioned "SJWs" yet. Don't you have any self-respect?
Toxic workplaces aren't just a problem for females. Unfortunately, too many men are afraid to complain about toxic workplace environments because they think it will make them look less like a pussy^Wman.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Prickly demeanor, personal attacks. This is simply a lack of maturity. Occam's razor
There is nothing inhuman about being managed by a straight talking lead who tells you exactly what you are doing wrong in blunt, uncertain terms.
What is inhuman and undignified is being managed by HR, to whom you are a number, and follow policies that dictate how your team is to communicate and what you are allowed to say.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
A lesser member of the Bach family of composers.
Have gnu, will travel.
If this is true then you probably haven't experienced real conflict in a very long time. I'm six foot tall. Most of the time if I disagree about something I just stand up, look at the person, and the problem solves itself pretty quickly. I can't imagine how much harder my life would be if I was short.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
True. Unfortunately there is almost nobody to complain to, and if there is, they won't/can't do anything. From my experience HR is there to cover the companies butt from legal problems. They will tick off a list of boxes so if an issue lands before a judge the company can say they were fair and tried everything. When I refused to tolerate my managers crap the whole thing degraded into a high school popularity contest, with each of us trying to rally as many supporters as possible. Most of my colleagues would rather buckle under the pressure and become doormats than put up a fight. I don't blame them. It's simpler, quicker, and cleaner.
I hope workplaces become more cooperative in the future, rather than the rigid hierarchical structure older companies have now. The same old problems will always arise, but at least it puts everyone on the same level so people can't abuse power imbalances. Google X lets people self organize in such a way that good ideas/people gather the most support. People work on the projects they think their skills can be used best. I read a great article about a large tomato processing company that had a similar flexible approach. Each worker must negotiate a contract with each of their stakeholders. The services/resources/money they have to supply, and what they need in return. Management then becomes a service. Good managers are chosen by more people, and are therefore paid more. Bad managers need to find something else to do. Same for workers.
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
Logic failure. We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel, or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs. I certainly wouldn't bother with either of those things, when there are plenty of other much better opportunities available.
I really can't understand why someone would want to work for someone like Jobs. If you have that much talent then your skills are in demand elsewhere, and it's not like Apple pays 2x market rate (in fact weren't they part of the scam to underpay tech workers that ended up in court recently?), so why put up with it? What makes that amount of stress and conflict worth putting up with?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Logic failure. We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel, or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs. I certainly wouldn't bother with either of those things, when there are plenty of other much better opportunities available.
I really can't understand why someone would want to work for someone like Jobs. If you have that much talent then your skills are in demand elsewhere, and it's not like Apple pays 2x market rate (in fact weren't they part of the scam to underpay tech workers that ended up in court recently?), so why put up with it? What makes that amount of stress and conflict worth putting up with?
While I actually agree with you that if my personal threshold is exceeded I'm willing to tell my employer to go fuck themselves, you're seem to be dismissing the fact that the most successful companies are those who you wouldn't work for.
Hell, you're saying that you don't know how many useful people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel because they won't take a public rant from Linus, but as a matter of fact we *do* know that they weren't needed to become successful. If they were needed, the kernel wouldn't be successful, ergo, they were not needed.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Wrong question. How much better would the kernel be with their contributions? Maybe Linux would have replaced Windows by now (unlikely, I know). Maybe it would have gained some really useful feature. Maybe a less hostile environment surrounding kernel development would have prevented systemd being what it is (divisive and rage inducing).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
"... -- 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."
Wow. As a tech worker who is at the tail end of the baby boomer demographic, this one hurt just a bit.
So much for the post-PC super pro-diversity in the workplace world line that the millenials and gen-x'ers like to purport whenever given the chance. IF that's really the sentiment among the younger generations in the workplace, it's no wonder that mentoring isn't happening so much.
Wrong question. How much better would the kernel be with their contributions? Maybe Linux would have replaced Windows by now (unlikely, I know). Maybe it would have gained some really useful feature. Maybe a less hostile environment surrounding kernel development would have prevented systemd being what it is (divisive and rage inducing).
You are presenting the hypothetical situations as a given. Linux, the kernel, is a runaway success. It is by far the most used kernel in the world. The most flexible. The most important. You want to believe that it would be even better had some of these hypothetical contributors materialised.
Your presentation of systemd as an example is a good one, but not for you. All the userland stuff - gnome3, systemd, wayland, etc - all those things are the product of organisations that have had a womens outreach program or similar. Compared to the kernel, they're absolute garbage. They've lost users in an age where more people than ever need a userland, while the kernel itself has gained users.
As your own two examples so spectacularly show, the projects that are huge successes in their chosen field have Linus torvalds type leaders. The divisive ones - the failures that have driven users away - they're the "inclusive" projects. What we mostly learned from projects like Gnome is that the contributors who have a political axe to grind are the worst kind to have.
As the kernel forges ahead gaining ever more users due to pure technical merits, your "inclusive" projects have turned into full-on retard-fests.
The reason is that, perhaps, the best contributors do not want to work with people who have a political axe to grind. The kernel, for example, was able to shed some deadweight simply by not caving in to the Sarah Sharps of the world. If they had stayed, would the other contributors have stayed too?
Politics doesn't belong in some places.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
There is nothing inhuman about being managed by a straight talking lead who tells you exactly what you are doing wrong in blunt, uncertain terms.
What is inhuman and undignified is being managed by HR, to whom you are a number, and follow policies that dictate how your team is to communicate and what you are allowed to say.
I agree; I think the problem here, though, is that there's a difference between simply being blunt and telling it like it is and being an asshole...but that often the latter believes they are the former. Adding to that, where does one draw the line...and what if the person who is the recipient of the blunt talk is simply failing, and trying to rationalize it away by saying "oh, he's just an asshole"?
Then there's also the big question: what if the person is an asshole, but also a superstar? At what point is it worth it?
There's actually a really great book out there called (I shit you not) "The No-Asshole Rule," by Robert Sutton. Sutton originally wrote a piece for the Harvard Business Review (of the same title) and it got such a positive reaction that he went on to write a whole book. The book covers the difference between being an asshole and simply being direct, the urge to label people assholes for all kinds of reasons, and whether assholes are ever worth it. Oh, and he puts forth a remarkably sensible definition for what behavior makes someone an asshole in the first place. It even touches on the fact that, at some point, we have all been an asshole in the workplace.
The book's an easy and interesting read, and it's really applicable. I found that it helped me temper my own style in the workplace a bit...I don't think I was a full-blown asshole, but I could have gone that way...and I find it easier to be blunt and direct without people walking away from the interaction feeling bad about it. Instead, they seem to step away feeling a sense of direction without negative feelings about the whole thing. And I really like that, a lot.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
A man and a woman are working in a server room. The man tries to run a command, and gets an error indicating insufficient security clearance. He asks the woman for advice, and she says 'Check your privileges.'
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
You're 6 foot tall, and a tough guy, that's so cute.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel
No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs
No, but we DO know that Apple has the highest market cap of all the tech companies (and all companies, IIRC), and is definitely the most profitable of all tech companies.
So obviously, these organizations' styles *are* successful for them. Maybe you don't like them, maybe other people don't like them, but the results do speak for themselves. It's not like all these turned-off workers are going somewhere else and those other places are doing better than Apple and the Linux kernel (for tech companies, and FOSS projects, respectively, which are two rather different types of organizations).
Basically you're trying to argue that these organizations should have different management styles, and that this would give them better workers and better results. However, you have ZERO evidence to prove this. You can't point to anything to back up your claim. These organizations are the most successful on the planet at what they do, despite your dislike of their management styles.
A couple other points: frequently (if not all the time), it's not the smartest workers who do the best job, in fact it seems that's almost never the case. It's like the tortoise and the hare story. Really smart people usually seem to not get along that well with others or be able to put up with organizational BS. How many MENSA members have made huge accomplishments in life and have their names in the record books for scientific or mathematical discoveries or anything significant really? A successful organization is able to take less-talented people and do great things with them.
Finally, just because you don't like Jobs's or Linus's style doesn't mean others really care that much. How much did the average Apple worker have to deal with Jobs? It's not like he was micromanaging every little thing (though he was known for being micromanaging); there simply isn't enough time for the CEO to run around and harass tens of thousands of employees. Same with Linus: he doesn't usually interact with most contributors, that's what he has his lieutenants for. These public exchanges with him are usually between him and one of his lieutenants or other frequent, high-level contributors. Your average person who works on a device driver or something and submits it is not going to hear from Linus. It's little different from any big company: what goes on in the corporate boardroom or between the executives or upper management isn't privy to your typical cubicle peon. With Linux, everyone sees it because it's all on a public mailing list. Did you really care if Steve Jobs yelled at one of his direct underlings in a private office and berated him? Of course not.
No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
All the Apple ones. And Panasonic smart TVs. I'm sure there are many more. Aren't a lot of routers using BSD?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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And in a lot of places, there's a lack of effective management because they've essentially been neutered, and are afraid to crack down on bad employees without a lot of history and an airtight place. This leads to places that end up with periodic "purges" because - short of getting caught pissing in the coffee pot - management is afraid to deal with employees f*** ups in the short term.
Unions sometimes exaggerate the problem (they do fix other issues) because their mandate has them defending some fairly vile/useless people because "everyone is equal". This screws other employees over doubly because
a) The shitty employee's lack of worth ethic and/or poor mannerisms negatively effect co-workers
b) The union is busy defending said shitty employee at the cost of time that could be dedicated to helping good employees
And yes, I've been in union leadership. Some people see unions as a big nebulous body but the fact is they're made up of people, and often have finite resources (manpower+funds) to deal with issues. Bad employees tie up those resources.