I've searched everywhere and it seems gone forever. It was a hell of a slide deck and I wish I had downloaded it before it got taken down. I'd potentially pay money to see it again.
One clarification: these are not official internal NYT meeting guidelines; rather, they are learnings from throughout my career that I documented and presented within my teams and departments when I worked at NYT. They developed a life of their own and were shared around the company over the years, but this is the first time I've seen them "escape" and get shared outside. Enjoy!
Thank you so much Brian, I'm so glad I got to read it again. Great slides, great content. You are an expert at your craft. I'll definitely share this with my teams!
I don't know if OP is serious, but more than once, his name has come up on this topic in discussions in the past that I've had with people in my social circle who work at Apple. He obviously gets much respect and is considered an engineer's engineer.
I don't think anyone would be against Woz stepping into to revitalize Apple. The real question is whether Woz would do it.
Everybody loves Woz, for good reasons, but (a) he’s not a manager (b) he’s not executive material (c) he’s notoriously unmotivated (d) he hasn’t engineered anything significant since what, the mid-1980’s?
Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.
Had a similar situation happen with another company. Went to take them to small claims but the judge threw it out because of the arbitration clause. We then spent months and many resources but were unable to continue because we couldn't successfully contact their arbitrator to proceed with the dispute. Long story short, we wrote it all off as it was becoming too expensive both with time and resources.
This is all by design, and admittedly, a clever way for companies to do what they do.
> Unfortunately that won't work. Most companies now have an arbitration clause meaning that you can't take them to small claims court.
They can only enforce that contractual agreement IF THEY SHOW UP TO COURT. Which costs them money, which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.
In your case you wanted a cash settlement. In OP's case they want a resolution. Apples Vs. Oranges.
edit: Looks like someone at Cloudflare responded to OP's issue below anyway.
> which means they will pay OP's issue attention which is what OP wants anyway as a resolution. Win/win.
Precisely this. It isn’t always about getting your whole day in court; sometimes it’s just about getting a human to intervene at all.
That said, arbitration would be just as acceptable as small claims court here. Either way, legal will see the petition and escalate internally. Arbitration costs a lot more than having someone open a support ticket, especially if your complaint says in plain language:
“This is solely to get a human to tech support my problem because I’m trapped in a phone tree loop that won’t let me file a support ticket. I plan to withdraw my complaint as soon as a human being engages with the technical issue preventing me from contacting support, so I can resume spending my money on Cloudflare.”
(Notice that this is careful not to demand a resolution to the issue. That’s really important.)
One can be considered an asshole while not being an asshole by many people's standard though. Anyone could find an issue with your behavior. Ethics and morality are not so clear cut. Plus, if behavior is an issue, one needs to specify that behavior, labels (such as "asshole") are extremely inadequate.
This right here is the reason code of conduct exists: so that everyone agrees on what kind of behavior is out of line before starting to work on the project.
What he said wasn't even nearly as bad as what I've seen Linus say in other threads over the years. Is / was Linus Torvalds ever subject to a "tribunal" like Kent just was?
In the end, it's the users that end up suffering. The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive with regard to the issues in that original thread.
I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.
And I would say on a whole his behavior after 2018 has been less rude although he is still quite frank when necessary. I think it’s a positive change.
I think Linus’s message from 2018 is good perspective here: when someone behaves in a way that harms the mission of the kernel it’s better to try to change that behavior at the expensive of that person’s contributions for a limited time, rather than having the bad behavior negatively impact all other contributors forever.
There is a huge difference between "frank" and "abusive."
One does not need to be abusive to "tell it like it is" (the most common phrase I heard people utter in defense of Linus's abhorrent behavior toward developers.)
Linus was a bully who let authoring the Linux kernel go to his head and inflate his ego.
The current CoC came out from a particularly bad incident with Linus, which he signed off on at the same time as he went into therapy and started working on himself. There is a remarkable difference in the before and after.
> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong, but I would be curious to hear what other ways people work with remote developers who are awful, especially when they work for other companies. You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.
They absolutely can "fire" them, by making a decision not to accept any contribution from them.
> I'm not arguing that what Kent did was right or wrong
You are actually arguing that it was right.
> The guy (Hocko) kept making mistake after mistake and Kent struggled to get him to do anything remotely net positive
That’s not really an excuse for abuse. This kind of comment is why we need a CoC committee in the first place. There is something deeply wrong when community members openly state that insulting other people is ok because they are not productive.
> You can't just fire them, so I understand the frustration here.
You can and should just ignore them. It is not mandatory to engage with people you disagree with and find unproductive especially on the internet where filtering them out is not that difficult.
Less extreme but also working is to just engage them less often. If you slow down the conversation, there is less space for them to annoy you.
But he's not arguing that it's right. That's a proactive action, not a default reaction to not arguing it's wrong.
Kent's comment is on the line, but it doesn't look abusive. Frankly I'm more curious about the assertions rather than the phrasing, which I think is only the offensive part.
Did Michal make mistake after mistake? Did he assert that crashes are better than error handling? Did his comments or actions logically lead to that happening? That does matter in system robustness.
It seems the meat of the statements Kent made were not explored, merely that he said them harshly. Holding back development because someone wouldn't apologize publicly seems pedantic. If Kent is being hyperbolic, ie inaccurate, that's the bigger concern.
Around the time the CoC was being established, Linus went to therapy. If I recall correctly, some people had spoke to him about his behaviors and he decided to do something about it. I think it was done in private so it's unclear how much of it was pressure vs his own decision. His tone has become much less aggressive since.
Honesty is often unpleasant, especially when someone tells us that our work isn't good enough. But it is a required thing from a leader. The important thing is that he's cut down on needless personal insults.
No, it is not a "required thing." Furthermore, a leader should set an example and be aware of how their stature keeps others from providing feedback to them about their behavior. For example, cops in many departments are taught to work at being exceptionally polite on the road, because they won't get the "you're being an asshole" feedback the rest of us do. Nobody's going to honk at them or curse them out for cutting them off.
"This isn't good enough, your code is sloppy as shit" - you're being an asshole.
"We have a coding standards and conventions round commenting and formatting. I encourage you to rework your patch with that in mind and re-submit it, because at least on cursory examination, your code looks solid."
"Thank you for resubmitting. This is much more in line with what we prefer. Now we'll be able to take advantage of the work you've done to fix this problem."
But Linus isn't honest. I'm sure he thinks he is, but he's not always "objective". So while he thinks he's being honest, what he's saying can be untrue anyway.
And of course he's Linus and you're a nobody so nobody will ever listen to the other side of the completely subjective "facts"
Being honest doesn’t have anything to do with being objectively correct, unless a person is presenting their subjective feelings as objective fact.
Saying to someone “your work is not good enough for me” is a subjective statement; whether or not it is honest depends on whether or not it is reflective of the speaker’s beliefs about the quality of the work.
A leader not speaking up when they receive subpar work is dishonest, and it is fundamentally unfair to the person doing the work.
1) only if you truly believe the earth to be flat
2) the earth being a sphere is an objective fact that can be proven by multiple means.
You would either be mistaken if you believed the earth to be flat, or a liar if you didn't.
That also has absolutely nothing to do with your original claim -- that Linus has been "dishonest" because his opinions about technical matters discussed on LKML aren't objective. There is a fundamental difference between stating a fact ("the earth is a sphere") and an opinion ("this work is not up to my standards" or "I do not agree with your approach to solving this problem.")
Note: being rude in expressing their opinions might make a person an asshole, but it does not make them "dishonest."
> 2) the earth being a sphere is an objective fact that can be proven by multiple means.
Thanks for telling me the point I was trying to make. It's very useful -_-'
> There is a fundamental difference between stating a fact and an opinion
There is, but often people mistake their own opinions for facts.
I'm sure Linus knew perfectly it was an opinion and not a fact because when he spoke about the issue we were having at a conference he kinda glossed over the bits that would have made it at least doubtful he was correct.
But of course people who hadn't read the mailing list and had no context had no choice but to believe he was absolutely right and forced to deal with very unreasonable people.
Had he said the full story, nobody hearing him would have thought he was completely right.
I don't think there is any point in continuing this conversation. You originally posted that someone was being "dishonest" because he wasn't "objective." That is simply incorrect, in the same way that stating the earth is flat is incorrect.
I wasn't party to whatever conversation you had with Linus, so I can't comment on your anecdote or if or how it relates to the argument(s) you are trying to make, other than to point out that nobody is 100% objective. That includes you.
Linus did take a break to work on his anger issues and he has been very noticeably improved these last 6 years. While I don't think it was due to a tribunal, but I think enough other developers told him in private to work on it.
Came a bit too late for me; I spent some time fixing bugs in an ISDN driver in my teens, but Linus’ reputation prevented me from ever trying to upstream it.
Perhaps, but still an informative article. Historically, Rob Norris and Klara Systems have contribute a good deal of features and needed bug fixes into OpenZFS.
I do work at Klara, but I'm a long-time lurker who finally decided to make an account. We are starting to post articles and whatnot again so thought I'd share.
I would argue that a watch can also be tracked but not in the sense that a phone can.
Assuming a Rolex gets stolen and reported as stolen, it can never be serviced by any reputable watch repair shop because it will be confiscated once that happens. In the case of Rolex, they will get serviced BY Rolex. Mechanical watches do need servicing otherwise they wont function properly. So even though watches cannot be tracked to the same level of fidelity as say, a phone with an antenna, it will likely still pop up eventually.
You can also make the argument that "Find My" and "activation locks" type stuff just means that the parts are going to get scrapped and sold. That could likely happen in the watch case too, so those features were never a silver bullet.
Gray market sales exist and Rolex will not service anything bought through the gray market, rather than directly from an AD. This leads to a lot of non-Rolex watchmakers who can work on Rolex. If they also do some check to see if they happened to be registered or stolen, I’m not sure.
I think it would be a bigger issue for less popular watches with more complicated movements, where the local watchmaker would be in over their head.
> Rolex will not service anything bought through the gray market, rather than directly from an AD.
Do you have a source for this? I was not under the impression that this was the case. I know they won't service any watch that's been altered or modified from factory specs.
There are thousands of watch shops that are not "official rolex" repair shops, but are very high quality and will never do a background check lol. And a rolex really only NEEDS a service every 10 years or so.
> There are thousands of watch shops that are not "official rolex" repair shops, but are very high quality and will never do a background check
How do they get official parts that need to be replaced on the watch? Rolex is super tight supply chain wise about their parts for this very reason that they want you to keep everything in house. So I suppose they are replacing parts on the watch with aftermarket?
How often do you need to replace parts on an automatic watch? After you get into a car accident with one? Seems unheard of to me unless rolexes in particular are made of paper gears.
The biggest issue are AI generated PR slop that takes time to process. Not this kind of "I'd like to make a PR in the future" kind of thing.
reply