A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces height and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts: "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him half an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."
"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.
"The man below says, "You must be a manager."
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
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This is the sentiment that I see in the article.
It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.
I've used https://github.com/StevenBlack/hosts for years now, and any close- and extended-family laptop or computer I touch gets it either silently or with some explanation if they ask me what I'm doing. Noone has ever complained. My only gripe is that I haven't written a cron-type update script for my extended family members who use Windows.
Which means I only update it for them periodically. It's still better than not doing it.
It aggregates someonewhocares.org and many other sources into a combined hosts file, to the point where it actually slows down DNS lookups noticably on most computers.
I even use it on my phones, and all other devices where I can access the filesystem.
Almost all devices in the world support a hosts file, becase most of the network stacks in use today spring from the same code.
Brutal honesty isn't for everyone. I personally grew up with friends who would deal out this kind of thing and I wouldn't feel bullied or humiliated. Sometimes it got to you but, there's no way around that, but over time you learned to develop thicker skin and bounce back without getting feelings hurt.
Especially when it's a personality style combined with the fact it comes from a place of caring deeply about the subject... then the motivation is not just trying to hurt the other person. This is the maturity, the point you learn to see in people.
Clearly Linus is heavily attached to the project and the person he replied to has been pushing an unpopular position for 3 weeks. It didn't come out of nowhere. He's also not new to this game. He's not some new intern, who doesn't know the deal, getting bullied by a CEO.
There has been a big culture trend to treat every small comment as potentially devastatingly hurtful, training kids to be thin skinned, and in my opinion, this highly disincentivizes honesty and will create a lot of inefficiency in business. As it requires a significant time investment to make sure even seemingly harmless statements are not 'hurtful', employing subtlety and skirting around an issue indirectly requires significant cognitive load. In a high volume, high pressure projects like the Linux mailing list this could really add up and generate bad decision making, as people will rather avoid an issue then invest in saying it carefully.
The ROI in that trend is questionable, as you can train people to see beyond the words and look at the person's real motivation and meaning, as it is not a given raw honesty is coming from a place of personal attack.
That said, obviously otherwise real hurtful and mean attacks, without an underlying purpose and genuine motivation other than to hurt the person, should never be tolerated. But sacrificing full honesty and non-heavily filtered emotional opinions in order to never have these personal attacks is just not worth it IMO.
The man below says: "Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees N. latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees W. longitude."
"You must be an engineer," says the balloonist.
"I am," replies the man. "How did you know?"
"Well," says the balloonist, "everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.
"The man below says, "You must be a manager."
"I am," replies the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," says the man, "you don't know where you are, or where you are going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is you are in the exact same position you were in before we met, but now it is somehow my fault."
--
This is the sentiment that I see in the article.
It reads like someone who is not a software engineer criticizing software engineers because they don't do what he wants. Sure there is a reference to culture and that. But, ultimately, he wants software engineers to care about business and market issues over software issues. He sees the software engineer as an impediment to the problems he is trying to solve rather than someone who tries to contribute through his domain of expertise. This situation is not going to change by using the amateur psychology of not rejecting an engineers ideas when they are starting out. That is insulting and, frankly, the heart of the problem -- that he sees software engineers as children to be led rather than peers who you can collaborate with.