After Years of Abusive E-mails, the Creator of Linux Steps Aside

Also first I've heard that the New Yorker was directly involved in the decision:

Torvalds’s decision to step aside came after The New Yorker asked him a series of questions about his conduct for a story on complaints about his abusive behavior discouraging women from working as Linux-kernel programmers.

On the topic of women engineers and also as a manager of top-notch woman engineers: wholly agree. For the Moneyball readers, I sometimes joke that women engineers are the Greek Gods of Walks when it comes to software development. Which is really just another way of saying that characteristics traditionally associated with women correlate in my experience with skills that are often underestimated in software development and evaluating them with brogrammer-world biases is a competitive disadvantage.

The no-context Linus quotes and the outlining of how he gets paid made this article seem like somewhat of a hatchet job meant to milk clicks out of the #MeToo movement, which I otherwise have no problem with.

You can PM on HN?

> I don't subscribe to the idea that women are delicate flowers and need to be protected from a bit of swearing.

You're right that women - like anyone - are generally capable of dealing with a harsh environment, but the difference is women are penalized for doing so.

The most effective way to operate in a harsh environment is to match it. If busting balls is the way your peers call attention to a technical issue, then when you want someone to pay attention, you'll bust their balls. If someone challenges you in a rude way, often a rude rebuttal is the most effective response.

Women can do that just as well as anyone else, but the problem is when they do, they're judged more harshly. This isn't a question of corporate policy, but of human socialization. We all unconsciously expect women to be more mild and agreeable. So when they are rude, profane, or combative, we notice it much more readily and it provokes a stronger emotional reaction. People are much more likely to write them off as "unprofessional" or "drama". This in turn closes off one of the main options for dealing with a harsh environment.

There are two possible solutions to this: fix human socialization so that people no longer have involuntary unconscious biases about combative women, or simply cultivate an environment that discourages everyone from being combative, so we can avoid the issue and get back to building stuff.

The former would be ideal, but it requires broad sweeping social change (and a lot of time). Until that can happen, we unfortunately have to settle for the latter.

> I think a lot of people use colourful language as emphasis.

You do not need to curse in a professional environment, full stop.

Letting a word fly out by mistake is one thing, it can happen to anyone. But overwhelming your emails, messages, and speech with curse words when it's completely and utterly unnecessary and can make people uncomfortable is unacceptable. We're all adults here, you need to be able to control your language and not make excuses for it.

In terms of lack of representation I don't see how they are not mixed up. When you're already the outsider/minority things like this just serve to further reinforce that feeling of not belonging. It is just another source of friction that reinforces the cycle of under-representation and if your goal is to break that cycle then making the environment as inclusive as possible is certainly something you need to deal with.

>people respond far better to praising what they did right, rather than excessively focusing on the negative

Interesting. I wonder how much impact all the negative feedback from social media and traditional media had on the timeline of the behavior standards for LKML.

He didn't say it to a co-worker, he said it to a hypothetical person that doesn't actually exist in the real world.

Quote: "So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place."

EDIT: Why is this getting downvoted? Because the truth doesn't fit the narrative?

Did you actually read the linked post before posting that? This is the final para:

So here's a plea: if you have anything to do with security in a distro, and think that my kids (replace "my kids" with "sales people on the road" if you think your main customers are businesses) need to have the root password to access some wireless network, or to be able to print out a paper, or to change the date-and-time settings, please just kill yourself now. The world will be a better place.

Given the above, do you feel that Mr T is telling a coworker to kill themself or simply sounding off?

As it turns out I do have something to do with security in a distro and yet for some reason I don't feel threatened by Mr T.

> I'm not sure how I feel about this article. On the one hand, it brings to attention an important side effect of the unfriendliness of the community around Linus, namely that it's particularly discouraging to women.

Why? What does that have to do with women? Linus said nothing about women. If you want to argue that women are hypersensitive and avoid conflict and therefore Linus is discouraging them, say it. Except saying that would be sexist, wouldn't it?

> "Why did this get flagged?"

Submissions (and comments, for that matter) are flagged by members. When enough members flag an item, the [flagged] tag appears.

Asking why an item got flagged is in many ways pointless: as there's no single member responsible, finding an answer more definitive answer than "users flagged it" is nigh impossible.

Speculating, this may have ended up displaying a [flagged] tag because a significant discussion regarding the topic happened very recently (3 days ago, over 2K votes, over 900 comments).[0] The discussion in many ways is contentious and generally produces more heat than light and new insight. Members may feel there's little to be gained by discussing it again.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18000698

Sexism in tech stories are always immediately flagged off the front page, sadly.

I suppose most people see the sense in a "middle-ground" where you work to improve a community you value instead of abandoning it at the first sight of trouble?

It is temporary as he originally stated, the title is just click bait of course.

I thought we were talking about abusing others? Someone's rights to feel negative emotions doesn't extend to other people, nor is it right to ask others to bear that cost.

There's nothing wrong with having unpleasant emotions, but there can be a lot wrong in how one acts upon them, especially when it affects others.

There's nothing wrong with unpleasant emotions. They are necessary. But most people aren't arguing against that. They're arguing against unnecessarily negative or abusive behavior.

Every person is free to experience their own unpleasant emotions. It's not OK to verbally abuse other people just because you can't control those emotions. It's especially offensive with email since it takes time to type and one could make a habit of not hitting send immediately - write a draft and give yourself time to cool off, then edit out the nastiness before sending. If that seems a waste of time, one might learn to just not write the stuff that needs to be removed in the first place just for efficiency sake.