An oldie, but a goodie
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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I agree with what you said in general.
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.