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The New Yorker on Linus Torvalds (newyorker.com)
Linus Torvalds announced on Sunday that he was sorry for how he treated the community over the years. Torvalds, 48, said he planned to make some changes to how he conducted himself, and on that part, he said he would be taking some time off from Linux kernel development work. The New Yorker has published a story on Torvalds today in which it notes that it reached out to Torvalds days before he made the big announcement. From the story, which may be paywalled for some readers: Torvalds's decision to step aside came after The New Yorker asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers. In a response to The New Yorker, Torvalds said, "I am very proud of the Linux code that I invented and the impact it has had on the world. I am not, however, always proud of my inability to communicate well with others -- this is a lifelong struggle for me. To anyone whose feelings I have hurt, I am deeply sorry."
Torvalds's response was conveyed by the Linux Foundation, which supports Linux and other open-source programming projects and paid Torvalds $1.6 million in annual compensation as of 2016. The foundation said that it supported his decision and has encouraged women to participate but that it has little control over how Torvalds runs the coding process. "We are able to have varying degrees of impact on these outcomes in newer projects," the statement said. "Older more established efforts like the Linux kernel are much more challenging to influence."
Linux's elite developers, who are overwhelmingly male, tend to share their leader's aggressive self-confidence. There are very few women among the most prolific contributors, though the foundation and researchers estimate that roughly ten per cent of all Linux coders are women. "Everyone in tech knows about it, but Linus gets a pass," Megan Squire, a computer-science professor at Elon University, told me, referring to Torvalds's abusive behavior. "He's built up this cult of personality, this cult of importance."
Torvalds's response was conveyed by the Linux Foundation, which supports Linux and other open-source programming projects and paid Torvalds $1.6 million in annual compensation as of 2016. The foundation said that it supported his decision and has encouraged women to participate but that it has little control over how Torvalds runs the coding process. "We are able to have varying degrees of impact on these outcomes in newer projects," the statement said. "Older more established efforts like the Linux kernel are much more challenging to influence."
Linux's elite developers, who are overwhelmingly male, tend to share their leader's aggressive self-confidence. There are very few women among the most prolific contributors, though the foundation and researchers estimate that roughly ten per cent of all Linux coders are women. "Everyone in tech knows about it, but Linus gets a pass," Megan Squire, a computer-science professor at Elon University, told me, referring to Torvalds's abusive behavior. "He's built up this cult of personality, this cult of importance."
I always though Linus was a bit of a douche bag, but really, a lot of intelligent people who achieve "fame" or success relatively young are. I think the same personality type that leads to the dedication needed to create something as important as Linux, also tends to create less than stellar human beings.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Plenty of people out there see any sort of strong self-confidence as "jerk behavior." In fact the more insecure the individual, the more hopelessly assholeish your confidence will appear to them.
Actually, unless you're coding for yourself, it really does.
Just getting the actual requirements out of clients/bosses can take hours, you have to be able to handle input (and criticism!) from co-workers, and then there's the inevitable complaints about problems real or imagined when you're done.
That is not an excuse, to be honest. I mean, you don't like talking to other people yet most people would consider you to be a nice guy. Same here, generally speaking. There is no need to be a dick in order not to talk to other people.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You can be both; a good coder and a good person. Being deficient in a healthy human emotion shouldn't be a badge of honor.
I think that some people get interested in tech because they haven't learned how to interact with people, for whatever reason. People are arguably more interesting than computers, but they are also more frustrating. I was raised by a single mother who avoided life. She didn't have a social life, so I didn't learn to interact with humans as a child. I had to figure that out on my own, and without the influence of the scruz geek scene I could easily have ended up as an incel white supremacist since I scarcely even saw a person of color until I was a teenager. I was even raised to be a homophobe, not so much by my parents, but by the kids around me at school to whom "gay" (&c) was an insult.
I'm still not much of a programmer, although over the years I've picked up the basics, but I always had a keen interest in computers. Finally, a complex system to which I could learn to relate without help! All I needed was the documentation, and time. I got involved before the explosive growth of the internet, so I participated in BBSing. And the tone of messages in forums was adversarial and snarky, so I learned to be adversarial and snarky long before I learned to be caring, or forgiving. I learned to respect technical skills before I learned to respect personal skills. That led to work as a systems administrator, but it didn't lead to happy relationships.
I work in medicine, and while many fail at empathy, at least there is a focus on it.
What? Must not be in the US. Here, the focus is on profit, and on treating people like machines. Get them in and out of the office with as little actual human interaction as possible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I know quite a few female engineers and some scientists. None of them have a problem with being called out when they screw up. All of them do it to others as well. And all of them can very well distinguish between a personal insult and language directed at their work but not at them. I don't think any of them would have any problem with the style of Linus or the kernel core team.
Incidentally, I had some interactions with the core Linux team from some bug reports I made and I found them to be very focused, but in no way arrogant or insulting or the like. They just have a lot to do and a lot of responsibility and really want to get the job done well. I fully approve of that attitude.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Apparently you can suggest women are generally weak, sensitive and easily insulted without being sexist. Personally, I find such suggestions hugely misogynistic.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
1) Not everyone you perceive to be an asshole is an asshole. Cultural differences play a big role here. Where I'm from, being blunt is appreciated and when we visit the US we perceive everyone as being 'fake'. (Which doesn't mean Americans are in fact fake, but it goes to show the significant difference.)
2) Being empathetic does not make you a good person. Some people, and among coders perhaps more so, do not empathize. At best they can be taught emulate empathy.
3) Your obliviousness to the above suggests your own empathy isn't as great as you believe it to be either. In fact, you come off as quite the asshole.
>There is no need to be a dick in order not to talk to other people.
The problem here is, "being a dick" is highly subjective and ambiguous.
We have plenty of other, proper words to describe activities where a person more specifically, materially infringes upon another in unambiguous ways (assault, threats, libel, etc.)
So what is being an "asshole" or "dick" actually? It's almost exclusively a judgement made by 50% of those in the specific scenario. One person feels another person had emotionally disappointed them. How easy is it to go through life accomplishing greatness in any area, and at the same time making sure every single person you come in contact with, has their particular personal sensibilities pandered to?
I would also submit that a key component of "being an asshole" involves not following other peopes' desires. But if anything, this is a definition of what a pioneer is. Someone who does their own thing. If you have an associate that you want to behave a certain way, and he behaves differently, it's easy for you to paint him as an "asshole", but maybe his different way yields something that is much more valuable to the community than your acceptances of his demeanor?
He is very often a humble, gently-spoken guy. It's *also* not uncommon for him to act the raging asshole on the mailing lists when he believes someone is badly out of line. The two are not mutually exclusive, and as he stated, on reflection he's realized years later that at least some of his outbursts didn't serve anyone's interests (due to his misunderstandings, or otherwise)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
There is no need to be a dick in order not to talk to other people.
Ideally no, but sometimes people just can't take a hint.
I work in an open plan office. It is probably the worst environment for the type of work I do (devops). I have a queue of tickets that I'm working and it's technical stuff so I need to focus.
Since it's an open plan, my "office" has no door and no walls. The noise is out of control, averaging about 70 decibels and peaking at 80 to 85. I wear headphones so I can tune it out and concentrate on my tasks.
Even though we have a chat system, I still have people walking up to my desk and standing next to me while I'm wearing headphones and clearly busy on another task. The interruption not only derails what I'm currently doing, but it takes additional time to switch contexts and get back into the flow. They could send me a chat message about their problem, or wait until I'm visibly not busy, but no they stand next to me and interrupt.
Years ago I had someone walk up to my desk, disable the "do not disturb" setting I had enabled on my phone (since I was busy), transfer a call to my desk, take the receiver off hook and hand it to me. I was livid.
Many times people are simply not respectful when it comes to interrupting someone else. I try to be nice about it, but it's extremely frustrating and if I'm already irritated by the problem I'm working on, I just might yell at the person when they interrupt me for some non-essential item that could have waited until later.
“Great spirits have always encountered opposition from mediocre minds. The mediocre mind is incapable of understanding the man who refuses to bow blindly to conventional prejudices and chooses instead to express his opinions courageously and honestly.”
Albert Einstein