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Comment by yedava | Hacker News Reader

Linus seems to inspire a lot of poor and motivated reasoning - since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality. If a toxic personality is a requirement (or a major contributing factor) for a successful engineering product, in a world of exquisitely crafted engineering products we should expect to see toxic personalities everywhere. That we don't should have prevented a cult of personality from developing in a community that prizes logical reasoning. Maybe the lesson here is that no group of humans is immune to some set of biases.

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> since Linux is successful, it must be because of his toxic personality.

Who says this? Just because he is harsh, abrupt and straightforward doesn't necessarily mean he is toxic. And even if he was, nobody is forcing anyone to work with "toxic" linus. If you think Linus is toxic then don't use his kernel, don't use his software and don't read his rants.

Everything is toxic nowadays. Everyone cries about everything being toxic. If you don't praise every mediocrity or give a trophy to everyone who didn't win, you are toxic.

If only we had more "toxic" people like linus instead of people who whine about toxicity imagine what the world would be like.

I wouldn't call Linux toxic but I see your point. Have you considered the possibility that your premise is actually correct?

Just few examples from the top of my head:

* Bill Gates was aggressive office bully and has admitted this himself.

* Steve Jobs was known to be nasty and unreasonable.

* RMS is notoriously difficult person.

* Theo de Raadt is really something (OpenBSD, OpenSSH, NetBSD)

* Ulrich Drepper (glibc, ...)

Above examples are outspoken SOB's. There is another case of engineering leaders who use passive aggression and 'niceness' to rule in a way that can become very unwelcoming.

People have to lead with the personality they have. Management can be leaned and management style can be changed. Leadership skills are tied to personality.

I was asked to run for office. So I became a politician. I always play to win. So I adopted the mannerisms, attire, speech patterns of other successful politicians.

I've seen many others attempt this transformation. Some are naturals. Some learn fast. Most fail (like me).

My point: The audience demands politicians play the role of politician. Over time, the person becomes the role (because how we talk changes how we think).

I don't think the person Linus could be successful playing the role of Linus Master of the Kernel without adopting that persona. So if he wasn't that way beforehand, he adapted.

I'm not excusing bad behavior.

You have piqued my interested. Is the problem at a social level? We want leaders who are assertive and strong willed?

I think most organizations suffer from this problem, not just governments.

For example, there are megachurches[0] that have gained huge followings only to collapse due to leaders with this personality and the will to hold onto power.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Hill_Church#Church_reorga...

I don't know. I wish I did.

Though I suspected, I didn't fully realize how much "playing the part" mattered until I participated in the endorsement process before, during and after my own candidacy.

I used to care about a candidate's policies, platform, positions. Now I only care about a candidate's ability to get elected.

Before, I didn't understand the "realpolitick" viewpoint, and actively criticized it. Imagine my chagrin after I flipped my worldview.

To get a glimpse of what I'm talking about, watch a bunch of endorsement interviews. Many jurisdictions post a video voter's guide. Some orgs and publications will post their interviews. Better is to show up and watch. As in join your local party (whatever flavor). Best would be to run for office and see it from the other side.

I know that a huge under appreciated aspect is learning that successful candidates are not like normal people. Going to all the same events, even carpooling with your opponents, you see what it takes to win. Politicians are super human. And have to love it. Doubly so for electeds.

As for the Mars Hill guy... That's a story as old as religion.

We now know that some percentage of people are predisposed to authoritarianism. Let's say 15%. If it wasn't Mark Driscoll (?), they'd follow some other charismatic leader.

Well, 15% is a lot. If you have 100, or even 1,000, devoted followers, you have the start of a movement. I've I read up on Mars Hill (and others). Their origins stories are all kinda the same. They sell a great story. Everyone believes their part of something bigger than themselves.

I still don't know what to make of all this.

Is it their temperaments that lead them to success, or is it their willingness to never cave and always do what they feel is right?

I'm not a fan of confrontation, and in the past have allowed features to get added to my projects that I didn't think was right. I regret it. Had I been willing to have some uncomfortable conversations, the project would have been better.

I think it is. I remember when in 2009, all over Germany (and Europe) students went on strike because they had several issues with how universities changed in the past years.

Students occupied large parts of the campus and started to work out their demands. They decided to try and go by a grassroots democracy. Everything was discussed and reconciled with polls in the biggest lecture hall. The whole thing made big news, was on all TV channels, the nation waited for the students' demands, and they kept arguing, and discussing, and the nation kept waiting, and then they argued about the order of phrases, single words, as long as a single person had a complaint, and finally after half of the students involved gave up and no TV channel reported on the topic anymore, some final document was handed over that nobody remembers, just as nobody remembers the response to it.

This is a pretty stark counter example, but to me it was a huge revelation to actually be part of this experience and see it fall into pieces. It shows that you simply can't always be nice to everyone and make it right for every single individual. Sometimes you have to be that asshole that leads the way and steps onto other people's feet, because a suboptimal decision made in time is often better than discussing every detail to death. A rough tone is simply (and unfortunately) an effective way to assert your position. Call it alpha male 2.0 or whatever. This realization also helped me dealing with that kind of person, not taking it too personal.

As for Linus, I feel like these kind of rants are really an exception, he's either in normal/neutral mode, or goes all apeshit, which I think makes it rather easy to deal with him (never did so far though). In comparison, the passive arrogance that a certain developer of some init system sometimes shows seems much more annoying to deal with (also never had an interaction though).

It is said that every successful enterprise requires three men – a dreamer, a businessman, and a son-of-a-bitch.

If you are starting on your own, you have to be all three.

There are also plenty of counterexamples:

* Chris Lattner was already mentioned in this thread.

* Larry Wall (perl, patch, rn) was unfailingly kind.

* Yukihiro Matsumoto a.k.a. Matz (ruby) is so proverbially nice that people coined MINASWAN (Matz is nice and so we are nice).

And even at pretty high level of Linux, there are people like Alan Cox who do not, to my knowledge, manage by temper tantrum.

The best managers I’ve ever had were blunt and somewhat disagreeable. The person I currently report to is like that, and I absolutely love it. Both of our time is valuable, and I never have to muck around with him. He tells me what he wants and what he thinks of my work. If I’m getting of track with something, then he corrects my course without wasting any time. It’s not a management style that’s suitable for everybody, because most people just wouldn’t be able to deal with it. But in the upper levels of management I think it’s benefecial, if not necessary.

I'm willing to admit the possibility, but I'd like to point out that half your examples are commercial products. There's a big difference in my mind between "get paid to work for someone on a product" and "volunteer your time for someone on a free project".

In particular, most business people I've worked for have been, well, let's say 'ruthless', even with their own employees. If I'm going to work at a company, I don't feel I have a lot of choice here. Most open-source maintainers are nice and reasonable (perhaps out of necessity), so if I'm donating open-source patches, I do have a choice there.

> I wouldn't call Linux toxic

Linus toxic != Linux toxic

In general, most intelligent people are aware of the dangers of sampling bias and try to avoid it. But what do you do when your sample size is really small? We extrapolate from what we have seen work, but only a handful of open source projects have had the longevity and success that Linux has had.

We see the same thing with decisions on what kind of movies to make. A handful of high budget movies are made every year, and when its time to decide which movies to fund studios extrapolate from past successes and failures. This includes wrong ideas like "no movies centred around female superheroes because Catwoman, Elektra etc" or "international audiences only connect with white leads, not with black ones". It goes the other way too, Black Panther's success suddenly means that international audiences love black actors.

Me personally, I don't think either of the conclusions wrt black actors is correct - there's insufficient data to support either hypothesis. But people make do with the data they have, which is the same thing with Linux. "Linux is wildly successful - what do they do differently? Hmm, must be Linus' management style"

I'd take it another way. The fact that he has some toxic qualities is likely orthogonal. Or, an indicator correlated with another quality.

This one is kind of fun. Probably Linus' greatest quality is his fearlessness. He did something publicly for the world, that the majority of experts were saying was a bad idea. Specifically, he made a monolithic kernel.

To that end. Yes, he can rant a bit. The question is if his rants reduce the conversations? It is as possible he shuts down thread that would have been more harmful. Indeed, most people he rants against are pushing from positions of power. And he rarely goes personal. (Ever?)

He doesn't have a 'toxic' personality, and let's not over use the word 'toxic'. It seems to me that you're basing this opinion on A) a few mailing list entries you've read (specifically _because_ there was some drama) and B) the fact that any comment which is even mildly rude is now considered 'toxic' by some.

There is nothing toxic about rants. It's the other way around, toxicity comes from not speaking out.

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