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Comment by Delmania | Hacker News Reader

A young female who's been using linux decides she wants contribute back. She's interested in software development, and knows a few things. So she picks a simple issue, codes up a solution and submits a PR. She's made rookie mistakes, nothing new. She's gets called a stupid bitch and told girls can't code, and that she should go back to her dolls, or back into the kitchen. She decides to drop her idea of becoming an engineer.

While I have no specific case to point to, similar situations have occurred many times in many tech circles. A strong leader does not need to tear people down, insult them, or call them names. You can correct someone without insulting them.

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If you have no specific case to point to then what the hell are you talking about? You can’t just make up hypothetical scenarios and then blame someone for something that never happened.

Also, while we are at it, how ridiculously simplistic and unempowering it is to pretend that a woman’s entire career choice can be determined by whether some guys are mean to her. While obviously it’s not her fault, and such behavior is unacceptable, shouldn’t the scenario end with “and then she told those assholes to get lost, because she was stronger than that superficial bullshit, got her commit accepted anyway, and went on to a lifelong career in engineering?”

The thing I dislike about your argument is that the women in your hypothetical is not a powerless victim who doesn't stand a chance. Imagine if every athlete, musician, entrepreneur, stopped and quit the first time they failed or were told they weren't good enough.

Should anyone be treated in the way you describe? No. But even if this DID happen you give far to much power to the aggressor when this women seems every bit capable to say "No fuck you, I'm forking this project and its going to have a better outcome".

> She's gets called a stupid bitch and told girls can't code, and that she should go back to her dolls, or back into the kitchen. She decides to drop her idea of becoming an engineer.

This is a complete strawman. Linus has never said anything like this and neither has any other open source leader to the best of my knowledge. Not even close.

Read the comment again. It wasn't about Linus. It was just a thing that happens and deters people from contributing code. That's why any project, and especially one as important and big as the Linux kernel should not be "my project my rules". You need safeguards against this sort of behavior.

> It was just a thing that happens

Citation needed.

Delmania was responding to stirfrykitty's argument that SJWs are ruining things, not Torvalds' specific arguments.

Their comment wasn't a strawman, but rather on point. Anecdotally, as a university student, I've seen plenty of times in group projects and asking/answering questions in class where opinions brought by both female and not-native (intersectionally, compounded) students are belittled or discarded.

Anecdotally as someone in the industry 20+ years I've very, very rarely seen this and 100% of the time it has occurred the offender was properly dealt with.

This specific scenario didn't happen. But still, Linus has been downright abusive towards contributors in the past. It might have influenced some peoples decision to stop or to never start contributing to Linux.

He's "abusive" toward technical incompetence. We don't want incompetent contributions to Linux.

> Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE F-CKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the f-ck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on? [replaced asterisks with - for formatting]

Is not being abusive towards technical incompetence. Its being abusive towards a person who made a mistake. You can be as forceful and as clear about technical problems without being abusive. A simple "this patch should never have been accepted, and if the approver continues to accept bad changes like this I'll need to re-evaluate their position as a maintainer" gets the same, or perhaps an even more forceful message about the technical issues across, without any personal attacks.

Technical incompetence need not be tolerated. But suggesting someone be retroactively aborted shouldn't be either.

He was abusive toward people, who made mistakes. There are ways of providing feedback, that don't include belittling people, questioning their mental health or straight up name-calling.

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