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Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Why is the top comment on this about engineering culture?!

Linus is valuable precisely because he occasionally d-slaps people around, waking them up, even when what he says may be factually wrong, and reminding them the at the core the tech must be sane, f people and their feelings!

Yeah, it's good to have a 1 in 1000 brilliant people being aholes because it keeps the culture balanced. We need a dose of rascality, and Linus can afford to embody it and seems to like doing it, and he's also good at fixing the consequences of his rants by being reasonable afterwards.

(If we're mature enough to accept that this can only be accepted of 1 in 1000 people or something like that, and that obviously not all people are born equal, we can move on and enjoy life.)

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For the most part he actually does a good job staying away from personal attacks. The problem is that his approach isn't going to yield great results. For there's 2 problematic parts to this e-mail.

The first is the personal attack when he calls Intel engineers morons. That 1 little unnecessary addon is uncalled for because it's quite reasonable that there's a lot of politics going on at Intel that's interfering with the engineering work. Could be that the next chip they're taping out can't be fixed properly without delaying & impacting revenue in a way that execs won't allow. Could be that there's legal reasons whereby Intel's "fix" is desirable from a management perspective to continue their denial of a problem with their chips to win or reduce the costs of the class actions. Or it could be any number of a hundred other reasons that the public isn't privy to.

The second, & this is pure speculation on my part that this didn't happen, is that he should have followed this in an offline discussion with the engineer. This public shaming doesn't do any good & just entrenches the frontline representatives of Intel to be antagonistic with Linus rather than to be his allies. I feel like if Linus wanted to be truly effective here in impacting Intel's direction (especially given their constant need to minimize the scale & scope of this problem) he could have followed up with the engineer off-list & gone "your explanation doesn't make any sense. can you clue me in on what's the motivation behind this approach?". It saves the engineer public embarrassment, it gets him an ally within Intel & it lets him have strategic information on what is motivating Intel engineers (consider - did his finger to nVidia in any way improve relations between Linux & nVidia?). Now if he did that & the answer still wasn't OK then he's free to use his bully pulpit as he wishes, but I suspect it was just instinctive & a build up of his frustration with Intel's handling of this whole matter.

If that is really the case, then calling the engineers morons is actually very much called for!

Note this is a hypothetical since it's quite possible it's not the case, in which case even by your logic the moron label is incorrect. So in your opinion engineers are unintelligent because they listen to the demands of people who can fire them or perhaps, god forbid, they're trying to balance technical solutions against revenue? That seems perfectly rational reasoning to me but that must be because I too am a moron.

It’s not hypotycal, it’s the part of hardware that made Intel CPU vulnerable to last week attack. Linus was right.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the thread beyond just Linus' complaint. This isn't about Meltdown but Spectre which impacts all CPUs with speculative execution. I believe these patches apply to AMD too even though Intel engineers are posting them as they appear to be generic x86 code. Not only is David brilliant at defusing that situation, he provides quite a bit of context to clarify confusion for external readers while correcting Linus' potential misunderstanding of the patch too. The "moronic" patch Linus is complaining about is to fix Skylake that still is impacted by a potential exploit even with the though the other less ugly fixes fix the majority of chips. David even agrees with the unfortunateness of the whole situation & says he's OK dropping that last patch if Linus wants because the Skylake vulnerability is less clearly exploitable. Ingo provides a follow-up suggestion about a potentially cleaner & simpler way to fix just the Skylake issue which is great & the whole point of how RFCs are supposed to work. So not only does it look like Linus' may have overreacted, it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

> it didn't even move the conversation along in any way (angry responses rarely seem to).

From your other comment [0] it sounds like it worked perfectly. The angry response first got the Intel engineer to defend their work and explain it better than they originally had, then further got others interested enough to improve it.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16216289

Stop rattling about definitions.

If you had been working in a company that had been stopping you from doing your job then by definition the projection of the results of your work is "the results of my work show that I am a moron".

If you took the brightest person on earth and stopped him from communicating would that still make him "the brightest but unable to share" or would that make him "an idiot who has never learnt how to communcate his opinion"?

I am pretty sure you would pick different names for the same person depending on the situation, especially when it's more complex than a toilet conversation.

It's kind of weird you spin it that way. I've seen all sorts of places and in general people at them bottom eventually stop communicating because people in the middle don't want to hear it. Just now I came out of a small session commemorating the death of a fellow engineer in his late 40s. His problem? Obesity combined with caring too much about things.

That's in fact the big summary of it all. Some people actually have families to take care of. Losing your job for most people is not an option. I personally don't care calling out bullshit, but I also don't have a wife and 3 kids. By that logic losing the job is the stupid option.

I guarantee you that both at intel and at VW people called out the crap from management, were threatened and then decided they don't care enough to risk their livelihoods.

Calling intel stupid is imho entirely justified, but your logic to me sounds weird.

That... or completely misunderstand it...

Very reasonable objection. So the engineers should be called "moral morons" or "ethical morons" because they are willing to follow instructions that stick Intel customers with terrible security problems, to help Intel shore up their share price.

Maybe Linus is being deliberately ambiguous about the type of moron he means.

Is this better?

Or maybe read the thread beyond Linus' rant. You'll get a better appreciation for the context. My impression is that Linus probably just misunderstood what the context/purpose of the patch & he's frustrated by the whole process & venting (which is fine). One thing Linus chiming in did accomplish is that the Intel engineers did a much job better explaining the motivation for the patch. To be fair it would have probably helped if the Intel engineers called it out up-front & explained why that patch is there (although maybe they did - I didn't read too much of it). They explain they knew it would prompt some volatile discussion & was the one they weren't happy about (not that anyone is happy about these flaws) so they made it last so nothing else would depend on it. Once the context was explained other Linux engineers chimed in with a cleaner way to accomplish it. All of these are senior Intel SW engineers and AFAICT they seem extremely competent not just on the Linux part of it but also in terms of understanding all the security implications on the Intel chips (these are easy to hand-wave explain & very hard to fully understand & fix).

All these engineers are in impossible situations trying to fix years of chips while at the same time providing a path forward for chips without these issues. You can call them morons all you want but from the little bit I've read I'm very impressed with their professionalism & knowledge and 100% do not want to be in their shoes right now.

>The problem is that his approach isn't going to yield great results.

Its worked so far.

> did his finger to nVidia in any way improve relations between Linux & nVidia

Purely anecdotal evidence, but in my experience the few pieces of hardware that I can generally bet they'll be fine with Linux are those branded Intel or NVidia (one may argue about the "optimus" thing, but if you want CUDA on a Linux laptop, nvidia's drivers do their job fine in the end, and this is what most Linux users will care about I guess)

Dunno the mechanics of it, but some things did work up just right about this :)

Because, as the comment says, he is wrong.

He may be technically correct in his assessment of the quality of the patches (I lack the necessary knowledge to even begin to assess it), but he does not go about explaining this in a sensible manner. He has never fostered a collaborative, inclusive atmosphere around the kernel.

If anybody at my workplace talked to a collaborator in that way they'd be in a chat with their manager minutes later, and if they persisted they'd be in a chat with HR.

For all that has been accomplished with the Linux kernel - and these achievements are huge and numerous and extremely impressive - I do wonder how much better things might have been if Linus was capable of criticising something without calling anybody a moron, swearing or throwing things.

What was in that email that needed that kind of language and tone? What could not have been said with a simple "I will not accept these patches" followed by a calm and dispassionate assessment of his issues with them? There's such an assessment in there somewhere, he's clearly thought it through, but one has to wade through the vitriol in order to get there. This is inefficient as well as hostile to contributors.

And these are people the community depends on for support, so we can run Linux on their products.

Most of Torvalds emails are not like this. In fact most of them are like you say, he explains his thoughts in a sensible manner. It's just when people play with fire that the lid comes of and makes the headlines.

A sensible mail discussing the details of some obscure technicality doesn't make HN frontpage.

Even if it's just once a month... I think very few teams would be able to deal with a co-worker with such violent outbursts.

Ok he's mad. We all get mad.

I've never said someone should have been aborted, no matter how mad I get. He has, over a ... A diff.

Perhaps he has some difficulties, like some of us do. Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way?

> Has he ever acknowledged his attitude in any way?

Yes.

> I don't know where you happen to be based, but this 'you have to be nice' seems to be very popular in the US.

> The same way we have developers and marketing people and legal people who speak different languages, I think we can have some developers who are used to—and prefer—a more confrontational style, and still also have people who don't,

> Maybe it's just because I like arguing," Torvalds added. "I'm just not a huge believer in politeness and sensitivity being preferable over bluntly letting people know your feelings. But I also understand that other people are driven away by cursing and crass language when it all gets a bit too carried away.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/01/linus...

Calling people morons isn't being confrontational. It's being an asshole.

Depends. If people are morons, you can call them like that and not be an asshole, just honest. Don't know about this case, though ...

Even being right, you can still be a jerk.

Though being wrong and a jerk is definitely worse in a sense, personally I think that attitudes that qualify you as being a jerk only marginally help you in being honest.

The basic idea is that even if someone is a moron, calling them a moron isn't really.... doing much. Very little information, and a lot of rudeness. Telling them that their patch isn't mergable has more info and less raw rudeness IMO

That's your opinion. Others would say the greater asshole is one who refuses to confront morons with their own moronic behaviour. That person is denying the moron opportunity to self-reflect and improve themselves.

And before you interject, I would also assert that numbing the confrontation with "civility" also nullifies the effect.

I think that is important to note as well. His email normally gets the attention when he is pissed off. But the majority of them aren't.

It shows how angry he is, and how he is upset with the issues. While this could be avoided in a real world scenario, I would have bet if your manager feel something strongly about, they would have went rampant as well. And this is especially in remote working, words are hard to get feeling across without putting some "adjectives" into it.

I vehemently disagree for one very straightforward reason: this matter is far too important to prioritise civility over outcomes. This particular matter needs sunlight, and Torvalds' response is giving it a lot of sunlight.

An "inclusive atmosphere" is irrelevant. Pointless. I'd personally say it's counter-productive. There's no scenario where Torvalds' response is going to result in Intel abandoning the Linux ecosystem. The engineers at Intel can now go back to their managers and say "okay, we tried cutting corners and it didn't work."

This is such a broken argument. The one upside of behaving this way is that it makes the HN frontpage and one can argue about the value of that for the issue at hand. It's pretty much established fact that, all other things being equal, being an asshole to people doesn't further your objectives and generally just results in people either ignoring you or getting more defensive and less cooperative than they would otherwise be. Being socially inept is not exactly a rare trait amongst very smart people but let's recognise it for what it is, a personality flaw.

> Being socially inept is [...] a personality flaw.

That's a very dangerous and messed up reasoning. For a significant proportion of the population "society" is just a nasty scheme we put up with since we know not better way of not killing each other or exterminating ourselves as a species... Having to contort and torture one's personality just so you can be "socially adept" is a great pain, and when one occasionally gets away with being able not to do this it's NOT "a personality flaw".

One ought to care firstly for developing his/her personality in whichever way himself sees fit. If it doesn't fit well with society it's not a "flaw"!

(Yeah, if goes overboard and results in a team totally breaking up... even that is not a big deal! Some companies are worth breaking up into pieces. Heck, as long as people aren't literally killing each other it's still not "a flaw". Stop being insensitive and discriminating against people with other notions of relating themselves with the thinggy we call "society" and perpetuating this oppressive culture of admonishing people for being "socially inept". Maybe those people have something better to do with their lives!)

> just a nasty scheme we put up with since we know not better way of not killing each other or exterminating ourselves as a species

Sometimes I "have to do stuff to keep my wife happy." Once I discovered that I'm doing it because I want both her and myself to be happy, and stopped viewing it as an obligation, my life significantly improved. I learned to enjoy the ride. I think it made life a little better for the people around me, too. I learned that being petulant/sulky/edgy was not a sign of sophistication or wisdom.

Similarly, if we don't want to kill each other or exterminate ourselves as a species, then "society" doesn't have to feel so nasty. If you really do want to burn it all down, then by all means, go right ahead. At least that's authentic. But to choose to live amongst society, and still begrudge it, is insanely unhealthy. Literally.

I generally agree with you. My "begrudging" was mostly misdirected anger at the parent poster's attitude of labeling as "flawed personality" the act of very rarely and softly lashing out at society every now and then. Society only gets nasty when we forget its purpose and add too many restrictive rules on top of it and then rationalizations for those rules and so on...

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