OR
We burn all those MLs into the ground.
Terrible culture in these projects is basically how everyone is conditioned to interact from the top down. We can't pick and choose which assholes are okay and which are not. We either push back on all of them to make a more professional environment or we accept this is what we want.
I've seen Linus handle people numerous times who are learning or do not claim to be experts and he is always respectful, civil and a lot less blunt.
Not to mention the fact that when Linus is shitting on people it's often because they broke something for the "user"[0].
Lennart is not this way, he breaks userspace, he breaks norms and has a _huge_ ego. He conducts himself as if him and his crew are the only good programmers in the universe.
That is quintessentially _not_ the same as Linus.
[0]: User is a broad definition here, but it covers userspace programmers.
Either the environment is civil and professional or it is not. You can't say, "It is UNLESS..." and then mention something that could conceivably happen in the course of a normal working week.
>times who are learning or do not claim to be experts
That makes no sense. If _Linus_ thinks you should know better is not the same as "they claim to be experts". According to you, who has claimed to be an expert and demanded that Linus should listen to them?
>and has a _huge_ ego.
Sounds a lot like Linus Torvalds.
>I have an ego the size of a small planet, but I'm not _always_ right
>I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.
>I'm always right. This time I'm just even more right than usual.
All direct quotes from him.
>I've seen Linus handle people numerous times who are learning or do not claim to be experts and he is always respectful, civil and a lot less blunt.
People who are sometimes rude to others can also be sometimes nice to others. This is not surprising in the least.
This is a false choice. We can choose our battles as we please.
I'm not specifically trying to defend anyone's "retroactive abortion" comments but, there is a stark difference between reading a comment that says you (op) should be retroactively aborted, and reading a comment that says with some subtlety and nuance that you have made a bad decision and should be ashamed of making a bad decision.
The main difference? Impact. Agreed it's not a positive impact if it causes you to be totally humiliated and leave, rather than causing you to re-evaluate how you arrived at the bad choice and do better next time. But a poignant message should be making an impact, that's what makes it effective.
These people are primarily responsible for writing code, they may not be skilled at nuance or subtlety in English language, and they may view exercises of those particular disciplines as significant time-wasting sinks that they've spent too much time on with too little ROI. (From experience, I know I often write too much, and say too little!)
I feel like you're pushing an agenda & have discarded any possibility of listening to other points of view, or modifying your position. I recognise it as 'listening in bad faith'. I didn't say I liked being inconsistent or tribal, you are putting words into my mouth in an attempt to discredit my position as irrational.
It's still a false choice: I can choose how I spend my time, and I can spend it in a way that I think is effective.
Also to that point... I've heard that Linus will grind you into the sidewalk for breaking userspace. I'm not sure that is the same thing that we are talking about.
I'm also not sure how accurate what I've heard is on the matter, but I think we absolutely can pick and choose which assholes are OK – the assholes that contribute to progress are favored over the assholes that impede it (for example, you may choose a different metric)
If you have a strong opinion and you back it up with facts, that's not just your opinion, it's an argument. If you have a strong opinion and you don't argue with facts, and you're not interested in opinions to the contrary, even when they are presented with strong facts, then you're just an asshole with an opinion, right? You can be inflammatory (I've heard that this is not just Linus, it's a national characteristic of Finnish people, and probably other nationalities too... again take with a grain of salt)... you can be an inflammatory asshole, but if you still present a coherent argument with solid facts and a sound rational basis, you may still advance the state of the art in spite of alienating some people.
