An oldie, but a goodie
This email should have stayed in Draft for a few hours and then come back to remove all the expletives. At least Mauro has something to hang on the wall of his crapper.
If I was VOLUNTEERING my time on a project I loved and got that kind of response, I would delete everything I had ever contributed and walk away.
I find it ironic that Linus’s explanation for
ENOENTbeing invalid for an ioctl given its meaning of “No such file or directory”, while simultaneously ioctl can returnENOTTYwhen using a mismatched device fd despite the error meaning “Not a typewriter.”In 2012?
But a file handle can be attached to a TTY.
I feel it’s equally important to point ot that Torvalds recognized his toxic behavior, apologized for it, and took steps to rectify it.
In an email to the Linux Kernel Mailing List, which also addresses the kernel update of Linux 4.19-rc4, Torvalds writes: “I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.”
“I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately.”
It’s sad we don’t get this energy anymore. Who will keep the fuckers in line now
That was seriously admirable. From memory he actually did improve quite a lot after that as well.
I’ve heard he’s not perfect but he doesn’t lose his temper anymore and has only gotten better with age. I respect anyone who can self reflect and introspect and come out a better person.
I’m really glad you added this, that was pretty awful to read.
Yeah, shouting at your subordinates in public is utter bullshit.
So is breaking the userspace
So two wrongs make a right? Or could this have been a civil private email instead? And if civil private conversations aren’t working, then it’s time to part ways.
A civil public email would have been fine.
Acceptable, yes. But a good manager knows not to shine a spotlight on the mistakes of the team. There’s nothing to gain keeping it public that you wouldn’t also gain by keeping it private. But your team’s morale is kept high if you sing their praises instead of their shortcomings.
I get what your saying, but i feel like the aggressively public development model means that more could be public here than i would accept on another team.
This probably helped others not to make the same mistake
Of working with Linus? Yes, it probably did.
What? I’m talking about breaking userspace?
Shut up Mauro
How sad to be working on a Sunday and two days out before Christmas.
Wouldn’t lift a finger for less than triple time.
Absolutely awful shit and I would be ashamed for decades if I acted like this to another person.
Really shows the worst of him here. It’s rare that he becomes this toxic and humiliating.
To his credit he undertook sensitivity training and is a much, much, better communicator now.
He used to channel the whole juvenile angry-but-gifted programmer crap, accepted (eventually) the criticisms and did the right thing: changed.
Lmao he is often celebrated for his put downs
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I think he’s being fair and balanced. Also please stop calling mild irritation “toxicity”, it only makes you sound like a whiney douchebag who cries whenever they’re questioned about anything.
Fair and balanced in the same way as Fox News. :)
If this is not toxic, what is? Where do you draw the line? Would you call this email professional?
Please don’t ever have kids.
I find this kinda insulting in an unnecessarily personal way. How is this comment not toxic in its own right? Kinda gross imo.
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This was anything but “mild irritation”. Makes me wonder what does a great irritation look like for you
I agree. In a leadership role it’s one thing what you say to a person in front of others and a completely different thing what you say when alone with them…
To be fair, if he said what he wrote here in private, it’d still be extremely bad leadership.
Obviously he should correct them and point out why, but maybe not trash on them entierly.
Looks like my trashtalk conversations with my discord friends. But if Linus said it was not acceptable then this propably wasnt a situation like that.
This is hilarious to read from outside, but I am definitely not speaking like this to my colleagues
As many seem to have overlooked itb this is from more than a decade ago.
And to those setting “not being toxic” == “being vague”:
Suggestion if you’re in a situation: separate the subject discussed from the person and, to the contrary to what is said in some other posts, be very specific!
Improvised example:
Hey all,
patch xyzz and its aftermath communication is unacceptable.
It’s content is not to the standards we have set here (explain).
Even worse, in the communication aftermath we blamed behavior of user space applications for bugs that are within our domain instead of owning up.
The bugs within the kernel will be focused on with highest priority by a, b and myself.
For the communication: (consequences). As explained the patterns shown here are unacceptable.
I have decided to no longer have x as a kernel maintainer on our team/enforce pairing for all communication/set up stricter consequence catalogue. Any specific action,really…
Not perfect as it’s very early here, I haven’t slept well and I’m not deep into the topic.
Just remember to separate subject to be discussed from person(s) acting please.
And always remember: bad communication is really easy and a lot of managers trained that their whole life! ♥
Reading this version I wouldn’t know the writer is deeply disappointed, frustrated and angry. It’s good you’re trying to improve the letter but this is exactly what many people don’t like about it: it changes the meaning. Perhaps you could include a paragraph which conveys this, such that the reader understands the gravity of the situation better.
Oh that was in purpose! It shouldn’t matter that I personally am angry. My employees should never NEVER try to prevent me from being angry but focus on doing the best job they can.
That’s what I admire about Linus: he realized the negative impact his anger had on the performance of others - and fixed it!
To be clear: I can be angry - but my anger isn’t the reason I want things to change. Being angry is MY FAILURE as manager!
Think about it in another way: do you want your colleagues do things they thin prevent you from being disappointed, frustrated or angry - xor do you want then to move your collective goal forward no matter what you’d think.
Another example: if I’d be the one to have caused this communication mess I’d want my employees to call me out - even though I will get angry the moment I realize I’ve fucked up big time!
Ignorning emotions is very unhealthy. I understand that it is seen as desirable in a business context, but it is very unhealthy and detrimental in the long run.
I apologize - it wasn’t my intention to imply that at all! Emotional self management is a critical skill for managers - and that shouldn’t mean “go away, emotions!”. A trainer and coach I highly respect phrased it simply: “emotions are. They exist if we like them or not.”.
What I intended to convey was “do not use a public platform to channel your emotions.”
If this would’ve been a private conversation I would integrate an explanation of my current situation, feelings and context for my reaction. And also this sounds abstract it can totally be a “dude I’m absolutely pissed. I need you to work with me through this.” (this works btw in both meanings of “pissed” ;)).
I think removing someone’s maintainer status does communicate disappointment in their performance quite well.
And as for anger and frustration, these things really don’t matter in this circumstance. Work is not therapy. If you need to vent anger and frustration, get a therapist. Employees are employed to do their job, not to be the emotional punching bag for a manager who can’t control their temper.
If an employee doesn’t perform to expectations repeatedly and even after you had a few constructive one-on-ones, then demote them or fire them. No need to vent your anger on them and lose your professionalism.
Tbh, the first time a boss of mine loses their temper and verbally attacks a colleague like Linus did here, they have also lost all of my respect for them. And at that moment I will start to look for another job.
I am not and was not advocating for venting - just for communicating emotion. This can be as simple as:
“Your actions have deeply frustrated me and caused great anger on top of [technical reasons]. I would ask that you be more careful in the future.”
This ensures the reader not only understands they hurt Linux with their actions but also another human being. Many people will be more careful if they know they caused personal pain to an actual human being and not just to an abstract technical object such as a codebase.
I know I am going against established cultural norms in western business context - please don’t disregard my proposal just because it contradicts established culture.
I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.
But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn’t the right way, especially when done in public.
In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.
Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn’t cause anger on Linus’ side, since it’s a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying “This change validates that rule of the project” and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, “We talked about this repeatedly, if you don’t stop, we need to take consequences.”
Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.
But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.
That said, I think it’s totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions (“We lost X amount of money” or “It took Y amount of time to correct it” or something like that).
I agree with what you said in general.
But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that’s a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.
This is probably taught in manager courses in order to protect their subordinates from managerial outbursts, which is a good cause, but they’re not quite right.
The Linux kernel is Torvalds life work. He literally spent most of the time he has on this planet on it, as did thousands others. Instead of watching his children grow, he made sure the planet gets a great operating system. It takes immeasurable effort to keep a vast software project in a good state - most large organisations with many times the resources fail to do so.
The maintainers behaviour represents a complete disregard for this sacrifice. They are showing through their actions that they don’t care that Torvalds and many others spent the little time they have on this planet on this software project instead of more fulfilling and joyful activities. I cannot imagine many more hurtful or disrespectful insults than this. It’s not far from saying their efforts are null and thus their life wasted.
I am saying all of this because I feel that you are speaking as a leader in a company, where you make sure other people’s money is spent productively. This not at all the same thing as what Torvalds is doing, because it’s not just a job, it is his literal life or life’s work.
This doesn’t excuse the behaviour, obviously - but it makes it very human. It’s good that he changed. I just hope we can find a middle ground between forced business speak and emotional outbreaks.
I’m not a manager (used to be team lead, but managing is not for me), but I’ve worked under a few coleric managers and some that where able to communicate in a sensible way.
One of my bosses, for example (that was the job where I was team lead) had a pretty similar style of communication as Linus.
Sure, the company was his life work. But I also started there shortly after the company was founded and I too spent a lot of time and was very emotionally invested in the company and the products. And my boss was just human (and on top didn’t know a lot about the subject), so he made mistakes. And his judgement was often wrong.
But he was never able to accept that he made any mistakes. He’d offload all his mistakes onto some employee, while claiming that every idea that worked out was his, and not the idea of the employee who actually had the idea and had to convince him first. And every time something went wrong, he’d slam the door of some employee open and shouted and swore at that employee.
Turns out, that’s not a great way to encourage people working there. Most of the good people quit after one especially bad explosion of his.
Back to Linus: is it human to be angry that someone disagrees with you? Maybe.
Is it in any way helpful to anyone? Clearly not.
I am pretty sure that anyone who gets to be a maintainer on the Linux kernel is heavily invested and has sacrificed a lot to get there. Attacking them like Linus did, that really renders their life work worthless.
The maintainer did nothing with the purpose to harm the Linux kernel project. He just accepted a change that he thought would improve Linux. Disagreeing on a factual topic with your boss should never trigger an explosion like that.
I would disagree just because the success of the product (be it closed or open source) shouldn’t be dependent on the feelings of one person. You can be frustrated and angry, but it’s more useful to explain why you feel that way and what can be done to address it. Including your feelings only makes the person not want to do what specifically hurts you, not what is best for the project.
Why not both?
Linus is best kernel developer and best person
What a toxic ass message. If he was my boss I would not tolerate this. It’s weird how many dickriders here are defending him here
Calling a bunch of people ‘dickriders’ is just as toxic as the Linus-message. Do what you want, but you are not an inch better than Linus.
But yes, the mail is toxic and unacceptable.
This has some real “don’t be intolerant towards the intolerant” energy.
Yes, sometimes insults are justified. No, when an employee/volunteer helper doesn’t share your view is not one of those times. Yes, when you’re confronted with a toxic fuck and those defending his toxic behavior is one of those times.
Exactly.
There’s a hell of a difference between calling random commenters “dickriders” and having your boss, whom you have a very unequal relationship with, berate you like this.
Jose1234, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
Fix your fucking comment and don’t ever blame OP.
Whoa WhoaWhoa, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
It’s a mistake alright - by the boss. How long have you been an employee? And you still haven’t learned the first rule of employment?
We never EVER blame the employee. How hard can this be to understand?
So Linus should have sided with someone who in regression report of KDE using 100% CPU starts blaming pulseaudio and opensuse and double down on blaming pulseaudio? Instead of fixing syscall returning completely unrelated error code. It’s like if your router crashed with message “there is no milk in your fridge”.
uis, SHUT THE FUCK UP!
There’s a difference between disagreeing with someone and insulting and attacking someone, and if you can’t tell that there’s a difference you can go fuck yourself with a cactus, you cumdrowned dicksphincter.
if only this were true.
fingers will always be pointed at us developers even as management takes full credits for the success every other time. :(
For sure. It’s funny in a way, but this is not a great way to treat folks that are trying to contribute, often on their own time. This could have been rephrased in so many other ways where Linus doesn’t come off as a total jerk, and still be “right” with the same message.
This is a message to an @redhat address, as you might notice. Mauro gets paid to work on the kernel and is not a noob who doesn’t know better, either, he’s a maintainer who fucked up basic maintenance.
Neat.
Linus could also be kinder.
I just wish for all of us to become more accustomed to working on ourselves instead of projecting the need to develop virtue on others. Linus actually did it, doesn’t mean that he was an asshole before. Brash, sure, crass, yes, but actual assholes don’t calm down as easily.
I kindly disagree with most of what you said. Linus is brilliant, and I appreciate his contributions not just to technology and freedom but also to society. However, this does not pardon the hardships he has also brought upon others.
It’s important to be honest in code reviews, but his language, while also honest, goes far and beyond that. We’re doing ourselves a disservice defending this behavior as if it’s a standard of communication quality that people should strive for, or learn how to behave like.
Current-day Linus wouldn’t react much differently. Cut the “shut the fuck up”, the one or other “fuck” (but not all, some need to be there for emphasis), done. It’s the real personal shit, the “should be aborted retroactively” stuff, that he cut out. “Obvious garbage and idiocy” is a technical term, programmers apply it to their own work all the time. Compilers are more technical in their language but we know what they mean.
And was this mail, seen in its total impact, a hardship? He went down hard, yes, and thousands upon thousands of Linux users breathed a sigh of relief, seeing that Mauro’s attitude towards userland doesn’t fly.
The hardest-hitting sentence in that mail is actually “You have shown yourself to not be competent in this issue”. Absolutely devastating. Taking context into account it’s the equivalent of telling a professional cook that their ingredients suck, what they did with them sucks, and most of all that the gall which which they claimed that the customer is wrong about their dinner sucking is completely, and utterly, unprofessional.
Of course that’s hard on Mauro. There’s no way to tell someone about such an epic cock-up without being hard. But not going that far, avoiding that hardship for some notion of civility, now that would be right-out cruel.
Please defend these statements for me. I’m having a hard time understanding how this is language we should strive for in a code review, even with your explanation.
Additionally, if you can give me any pointers on how I can communicate this way, I’m all ears and would appreciate the help.
No one is arguing that Linus isnt a total jerk.
Just like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and even Ol Musky…
We can be better. We can both be a community that is extremely direct with our core values and code it well, but we can also treat people right.
It’s a reality in many places. And it’s thanks to the many many many assholes that I listed above that brought this change.
Not sure those three names belong in the same list.
What a toxic ass message
dickriders
Oh the irony…
You’re exactly proving my point
how does he?
He is the dickrider I’m talking about. Being contrarian for their beloved Linus.
Me saying one derisive word on an online forum is not exactly the same as a business environment where your for the lack of a better word boss is publicly cussing you out and humiliating you. There are a million other ways to get the point across without being an ass about it.
If only there was a way for you to get your point accross, without insulting others.
What does one’s practice of riding dicks have to do with anything?
It only proves your hypocrisy as you’re being toxic yourself.
I mean he went ballistic, but how long did he tell Mauro? I would have fired Mauro instead.
So glad he got therapy (after this post or very probably because of it).
That said, fuck Nvidia.He did? Couldn’t tell based off of this message
you should always check the date of anything you see online before forming any thoughts about it.
This is from 2012
Nah, if you were spouting bullshit your boss won’t tolerate you.
Linus never mails random contributers working on their own time. There are different maintainers for that.
Linus sends mail to people working under him directly.
Prolly cause your boss doesn’t have half the responsibilities Linus did or had to deal with as many retards.
Weak ass excuse
Well, he isn’t anyone’s boss here. I agree, and so would linus nowadays, that this is toxic and should be avoided, but the anger I fully understand.
Attempting to shift blame away from yourself after making a change which breaks a large portion of user space is cause for termination at any company I’ve worked at. It’s cowardice. This action goes against one of the most important, core philosophies, of the kernal. Do not break userspace. Also, this person should know better. They are not some odd newbie who may not grasp the ideas yet.
In a world where termination is not an option harsh criticism is required. This though, I agree, was anger driven unprofessionalism
There is a way to say all of that and not be a dick about it. Angry responses are seldom needed.
I think there may also be a cultural angle here. Anglo-Saxon culture really places a much higher emphasis on “not causing offense”, whereas other cultures place a higher emphasis on speaking truthfully, even if harshly.
So Linus, who grew up in Finland, may have thought of his message as harsh but fair, whereas to native English speakers it comes across as incredibly rude.
It doesn’t come across as particularly rude given what the offense here is. Someone blamed other projects for their mistake after getting called out. That deserves harsh criticism.
I think you are talking about American ideals. Not ideals in the English speaking world. Nothing here is remotely toxic by British standards. Swearing isn’t a big deal here, people regularly call each other swear words as a sign of affection. If someone does something stupid you can say they are acting like an idiot and hopefully they will listen. If you didn’t they might not think you are serious.
One does not simply break userspace. You’ll receive more than just angry bug reports. There are restless maintainers who will not sleep. And the great corporations are ever watchful.
Honestly, I maybe get why some people are too sensitive to work in such conditions, but from my professional experience, I’d much rather prefer getting angry mail explaining why my actions are stupid, than everyone being nice to one another but the codebase is utter garbage and everything falls apart, which happens a lot in private companies.
Poor Mauro: they weren’t good at what they loved, they blamed others for their failings, and their community leader was nuts.
Jokes aside, we’ve already got toxic right there. Linus isn’t right, but someone like that would be fired with good cause. It’s one thing to make a mistake, it’s quite another to blame your co-workers for your own shoddy work.
What’s that Reddit phrase? ESH!
