squaresinger

Flipping H E double hockeysticks! You aren't supposed to use such fucking swearwords here!

I'm not a manager (used to be team lead, but managing is not for me), but I've worked under a few coleric managers and some that where able to communicate in a sensible way.

One of my bosses, for example (that was the job where I was team lead) had a pretty similar style of communication as Linus.

Sure, the company was his life work. But I also started there shortly after the company was founded and I too spent a lot of time and was very emotionally invested in the company and the products. And my boss was just human (and on top didn't know a lot about the subject), so he made mistakes. And his judgement was often wrong.

But he was never able to accept that he made any mistakes. He'd offload all his mistakes onto some employee, while claiming that every idea that worked out was his, and not the idea of the employee who actually had the idea and had to convince him first. And every time something went wrong, he'd slam the door of some employee open and shouted and swore at that employee.

Turns out, that's not a great way to encourage people working there. Most of the good people quit after one especially bad explosion of his.

Back to Linus: is it human to be angry that someone disagrees with you? Maybe.

Is it in any way helpful to anyone? Clearly not.

I am pretty sure that anyone who gets to be a maintainer on the Linux kernel is heavily invested and has sacrificed a lot to get there. Attacking them like Linus did, that really renders their life work worthless.

The maintainer did nothing with the purpose to harm the Linux kernel project. He just accepted a change that he thought would improve Linux. Disagreeing on a factual topic with your boss should never trigger an explosion like that.

It's all set in the constitution. Not on purpose but in the systems and incentives it declares.

I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.

But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn't the right way, especially when done in public.

In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.

Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn't cause anger on Linus' side, since it's a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying "This change validates that rule of the project" and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, "We talked about this repeatedly, if you don't stop, we need to take consequences."

Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.

But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that's a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.

That said, I think it's totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions ("We lost X amount of money" or "It took Y amount of time to correct it" or something like that).

The word "dwarf" derives from the Old German word "dwurf" which has evolved in German to "Wurf" and is equivalent to the English word "throw".

We are (big air quotes) "slave free".

So you are saying personal offenses and coleric bosses are required to deliver quality?

How does screaming and shouting like a little kid in a temper tantrum increase quality?

If you need to resort to personal offenses to get your point across, you are either lacking a good point, communication skills or respect.

And behaving like a toddler tends to make people really respect you, right?

You want some stern words?

You are a useless peace of dead weight in this community. Your comments suck and you have no idea how people work and how to professionally communicate. I hope you never have a job, let alone one in a management role. You should leave and never come back. Get aborted retroactively! You make the world a worse place by your mere existance!

How do you feel about that? Are you going to change your behavior because of these "stern words"? Or are you going to think "What an idiot" and ignore everything I said?

And we both are just anonymous randos on the internet and while this comment is public, not a lot of people are going to read it and it will have zero impact to either of our lives.

Now imagine I was your boss, both of us are publically known people and I post this on the company social media account together with your full name.

And people still dig this up 10 years later to laugh at it.

Please reconsider your interpersonal behaviour.

If all your engineers fuck everything up, maybe the problem is with their leadership who never learned to communicate clearly and professionally.

I hope I never meet you. You really don't know how to human.

I think removing someone's maintainer status does communicate disappointment in their performance quite well.

And as for anger and frustration, these things really don't matter in this circumstance. Work is not therapy. If you need to vent anger and frustration, get a therapist. Employees are employed to do their job, not to be the emotional punching bag for a manager who can't control their temper.

If an employee doesn't perform to expectations repeatedly and even after you had a few constructive one-on-ones, then demote them or fire them. No need to vent your anger on them and lose your professionalism.

Tbh, the first time a boss of mine loses their temper and verbally attacks a colleague like Linus did here, they have also lost all of my respect for them. And at that moment I will start to look for another job.

I can second Xfce. I'm using it on the chroot Linux I run on my phone. It doesn't get much lower end than that, and Xfce performs perfectly.

And it feels much more polished than LXDE.