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Many people are tired of the toxic positivity common in corporate speak, which lets poor performers off the hook, and prevents high-quality talent from speaking freely.

"A complete lack of empathy" is a bit of a stretch, no? Calling someone a monkey is fairly lighthearted, while getting the point across that maybe they should take stock of the awareness of their abilities.

Here’s a “high performer” realising that it was his toxicity that was the problem, and he needs to fix it.

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.

> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.

And he did. And the project he heads is better for it. You don’t need to call people names to run a project well. Linus learned that. It’s time that other people who failed to grow up learn it too.

There are honest constructive ways to engage that don't let poor performers off the hook.

Calling people monkeys and losers is just shitty. It doesn't achieve anything, it's divisive, and it's often counterproductive because it creates cultures of fear.

> A complete lack of empathy...

...for one of the largest of most toxic IT companies in the history if IT?

Spare me, please. Microsoft is the last legal entity in the universe you should feel empathy for.

He’s talking about people who wrote the code. Those are actual people. You’ve abstracted them away as “Microsoft” and decided they don’t deserve any empathy.

a lot of "actual people" are also suffering from dunning kruger and just love to build stupid shit that nobody wants in horrific ways.

> You’ve abstracted them away as “Microsoft”

No, they did this when they joined Microsoft, not me. You don't get to be "an actual person" when you're paid by Microsoft to write Microsoft code for a Microsoft product.

You’re talking about Microsoft like they’re ISIS or al-Qaeda. You sound unhinged. If you ask people “do Microsoft employees deserve to be treated as human beings”, 99.999999% of them will answer “yes of course”.

People like you terrify me.

> If you ask people “do Microsoft employees deserve to be treated as human beings”

No, I'm asking if Microsoft emploee code gets to be judged as a work of a person instead of a corporation, and the answer is a resounding NO.

Nobody cares what Microserfs do in their personal life. (I'm sure they're great people, some of my closest relatives were Microserfs too.)

> One commenter justifies it by saying “if I’m fucking up, it’s ok to speak to me this way”. Sure guy, we believe you.

Did you read the issue at hand?

This is not average people making "mistakes". This is severe incompetence at every layer of decision making, and a complete lack of care for quality work. If you want to be mad at someone for being unfair, be mad at the manager of these people for putting them in a position they are grossly unprepared for.

> Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Could you review the guidelines of this website and follow them?

> no one would like to be treated this way themselves

I'd like to be treated this way if I am doing really stupid things. If I am doing the kind of stupid things GitHub is doing, I'd rather someone call me out as a monkey so that I know I f-ed up.

I know calling "monkey" is not professional but my expectation of professional treatment stops at my office with my colleagues and at a few other places. I don't expect the whole world to be professional to me. I can take some bloke on the internet calling me a monkey if that helps me to introspect and make things right.

If they're nice about it and choose professional words to tell me I'm being stupid, that's great. But if they cannot and they call me "monkey", I'll take that too. I'd rather have the feedback in whatever words they can muster than not have the feedback at all.