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Comment by Dr_tldr | Hacker News Reader

What you're doing is a bullshit power move in attempting to threaten someone's job because you don't like their attitude. One discussion where someone was an arrogant douche might be outweighed by the sum total of all their contributions.

If all Poettering did was community outreach, you would have a much stronger case that he's bad in all aspects of his job and should be fired. Trying to pressure Red Hat by saying it 'reflects poorly on you' is basically saying 'you should get rid of this guy even if you think the good outweighs the bad, because I don't like him.'

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No, this is a decision on the fact that he has made many many discussions where he was an arrogant douche. This is a decision made where he's made many many technical flaws, such as including the fundamentally broken efivarsfs in systemd, in choosing poor defaults for other portions of systemd, like pointing the default ntp server against a source which says not to use it as such, like in making the easily-corrupted journal an inexorable part of systemd. He has a long track record of making questionable decisions and then getting downright petulant when criticized. He's being paid in part to be a leader of a few high profile projects when he shows a lack of leadership ability. That's why I feel he should be gotten rid of.

Perhaps you're right that he should be gotten rid of, but redirecting criticism of him toward Red Hat is precisely not the way to achieve that. Red Hat won't care if you criticize them as a company. Why should they? However, effective community leadership/stewardship is part of the job description for someone like Poettering. If a person's conduct is poor, criticism should remain focused on them individually. If there's enough such criticism, then the project's own community should act to resolve the situation. It's both less optimal and less likely for an employer or sponsor to take action, but even then it would only be due to criticism of the individual and not themselves. One of the nice things about open source is that it's resistant to such political "get you in trouble with your boss" backstabbing. Address the individual directly and honestly, or forget it.

> However, effective community leadership/stewardship is part of the job description for someone like Poettering.

If this is true, then this is exactly _why_ the criticism should be directed towards Redhat. Because in his arrogant world view, he can do no wrong, so he will not report to his bosses that he has ineffective community leadership/stewardship. The only way his bosses will know of his ineffective leadership/stewardship is if the criticism is directed towards Redhet, and therefore, his bosses.

I.e., the criticism has to go around the roadblock, Poettering being that roadblock.

Since HN won't let me respond to uuoc directly, I'll respond here. I wasn't saying criticism should only be directed to its target. That's not the kind of "redirection" people seemed to be suggesting. What I'm saying is that the criticism should remain about that person, not displaced onto some third party. Believe it or not, it's possible to see how someone's behavior is affecting a project, without relying on that person to convey such information themselves. We've all done it here, after all. Anybody who thinks it's reasonable to blame individual behavior on someone's employer should consider whether they'd be comfortable with the idea when it's their behavior and their employer involved. I doubt it.

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