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Sharp: Closing a door

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:01 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909)
In reply to: Sharp: Closing a door by dskoll
Parent article: Sharp: Closing a door

I'm sorry, but not "only the code matters." I'd go so far as to say "only people matter". Treating people as disposable resources in the pursuit of some holy grail of code quality is simply unethical. It's no different from a closed-source company abusing underpaid foreigners in sweatshops... sure, they produce lots of cheap code, but at what human cost?

I'm not sure you understood the point of my post so I'll try again.

The author of the linked post described the ways in her preferences have not been achieved with regards to Linux development. There is nothing wrong with this - she's trying to maximize the achievement of her preferences just like every other living human.

Just like her, I also have preferences. If anyone ever wants to convince me to help them achieve their preferences, all they need to do is convince me that doing so will help me achieve mine and then I will help them.

This is the definition of cooperation: a combined effort that results in mutual benefit.

By stating my preference for the highest-quality kernel achievable, I've told everyone reading this thread exactly what they need to know in order to obtain my cooperation regarding issues surrounding the kernel. Convince me that if I take an action (which can be as simple as lending social support to a particular position) that I'll get a superior kernel out of it.

If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

to post comments

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:26 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (92 responses)

If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

I would go so far as to say that's an immoral position. It's not as if you're balancing off one boring technical tradeoff against another. What you are saying, essentially, is: "I don't care how people treat each other unless they can convince me that treating other people decently improves the quality of the kernel." Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 17:38 UTC (Mon) by scali23 (guest, #104768) [Link] (15 responses)

> Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath.

Are you wearing a pair of trousers? Or maybe using a smartphone / PC? Do you happen to know the suffering that went into that shiny piece of technology / cloth? Did you when you were deciding to buy it?
Far for me saying that every choice has the same ethical implications (on the contrary), but addressing someone as psychopath/sociopath might be a step too far.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:00 UTC (Tue) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link] (7 responses)

> Far for me saying that every choice has the same ethical implications (on the contrary), but addressing someone as psychopath/sociopath might be a step too far.

Actually, my though was exactly like dskoll's. "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.", too. It *does* match the pattern.

> Are you wearing a pair of trousers? Or maybe using a smartphone / PC? Do you happen to know the suffering that went into that shiny piece of technology / cloth? Did you when you were deciding to buy it?

The ethical ramifications of our consumerist culture is whole another Pandora's box, but I would say that most of the people buying clothes and electronics are simply not aware of the abuse of workers (and environment) that enables our enjoyment of low prices - it's not [usually] willful ignorance or explicit neo-Darwinian, orthodox-Capitalist, mechanistical approach to other people(s) ("they're weak so they deserve to be oppressed by the strong", "it's just the market forces at work", etc.). I don't think anyone can say at this point that they're not aware of these issues in the kernel community.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 15:29 UTC (Fri) by aristeu (subscriber, #35826) [Link] (6 responses)

> Actually, my though was exactly like dskoll's. "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.", too. It *does* match the pattern.

Someone does something technically stupid and a developer replies classifying said work as "idiotic" which also "does match the pattern" of what "idiotic" means and that's horrible and unacceptable.

But, since it's now trendy and socially acceptable (by some) classifying people as "psychopath", "sociopath", "misogynist", "racist" and whatever to as quickly as possible label someone as something that is known bad as form of winning the discussion, that's ok to perform a psychological evaluation based in a comment or two. It's like Godwin's law, but you look smarter too.

But hey, that's ok, "I'm sorry if this sounds harsh" was used before it.

In your culture doing something "idiotic" is way more offensive than being pointed as "psychopath" in a public forum. Did you ever consider if the person on the other side shares the same standard?

I for one see the Linux kernel as a project where I'm not there to make friends (if I do, great!), but to contribute. A refuge where true meritocracy (or as close we can get) exists and doesn't matter who you are, who you know or where you're from. In such a place, people try to understand where's the technical point behind whatever form of expression, broken english, understanding that people come from different cultures, backgrounds and their main reason behind patches are, you know, code. Thanks to that, people that agree with Sarah will still have their patches accepted if they're technically correct, despite Linus or anybody else disagreeing with these people's personal views. If enjoying being part of Linux kernel development as is and enjoying the fruits of meritocracy "does match the pattern" and makes you think I'm a "psychopath/sociopath" too, well, have fun.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 20:38 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (5 responses)

More generally, any argument resting on a faux-psychiatric[0] characterization of the opponent is a piss-poor argument. At most such a thing could be made as an act of petulance, or tacit admission of defeat. Yet `dskoll' went on for a while before finally claiming to have only been pretending the idiot.

As usual, the Linux community is far too reluctant to just say "oh fuck that shit, and fuck you too". And so you get played for sport, your efforts wasted in arguments with the west-coast touchy-feely tar-pit. Even the classic move of turning the discussion from being about a topic external to all participants, to being about one of the participants themselves[1], seems to have moved no-one.

[0] unless actual, degreed and licensed professional physicians are now giving unsolicited statements over the Internet -- and eschewing any chance of payment, too!
[1] for example, by speculating about their motives and then instead of justifying that speculation, passing judgement on the person[2].
[2] in this case, a variation of "you're so selfish (to not obey at once)", with a couple of freshman-tier power words tacked on because (and I speculate) that's what the other cool kids do, too.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:02 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Please note that I did not psychoanalyze anyone. I merely said: The following behavior is what I'd expect from a psychopath: The pursuit of selfish goals above all else including other people's feelings.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:39 UTC (Tue) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (3 responses)

Yes, deny an accusation that wasn't made, and that would be at most peripheral to the argument. Because that sure changes everything.

Good day.

Second request

Posted Oct 13, 2015 14:44 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Please...let's bring this to an end. The useful part of the discussion is past, and I'd just as soon do without any more of this kind of stuff.

Second request

Posted Oct 18, 2015 12:01 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Yo. Yo!

Which part of "good day", to you, doesn't indicate that the branch of discussion is at an end? That I'm dropping the mic, tapping out, refusing to keep wrestling the pig?

More pertinently, where were you when the kindergarten-tier arguments of "that's what a sociopath would say" were ringing out, seemingly for as long as it need go? Does this just-about-readiness to close the discussion only come out when it moves out of the designated circlejerk? When the new political class gets told? When an Incontrovertible Holy Minority of Antioch requests assistance over private channels? But I repeat myself.

Articles concerning touchie-feelie topics always have a great big shitstorm in the comment section, with seemingly limitless catty abuse hurled at those who would refuse an emotional argument, or worse still, argue from evidence and reason to any conclusion besides the pre-chewed one we're expected to swallow. This is true also of articles concerning systemd; we've seen your comment section's finest politruks drive away technologists just for being "on the wrong side". What's your plan concerning this phenomenon, beyond an instinctive supplication to the best passive-aggressives that good-boy points can hire?

Is it truly the beardies alone who're at fault, here? It's certainly so if one asks the opponent: they do have naught but hatred for wrongthink, after all. "Listen And Believe", as they say: there never was any "Unix Philosophy", basic human rights as recognized by the UN are subordinate to the self-stated need of Sacred Minorities and their Not At All Chauvinist Spokespersons, and we've always been at war with Toxic Rape Apologists. Or what?

Though I could be wrong here, certainly. You could be addressing the rest of the thread by posting at one of its tails, and not my comment in particular. If that's the case then do forgive me for reading your comment as it was posted; I had no idea.

Second request

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:39 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Which part? Maybe the part where you have to get the last word in no matter what?

Look, my desire was to close down the conversation as a whole, I said as much; I was not speaking to any single specific person.

That said, I am now speaking to you. This comment was aggressive, the one attacking Matthew Garrett rather more so. You have moved quite firmly into the realm of personal attacks, and you need to stop now.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:24 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

Are you wearing a pair of trousers?

Well, a skirt actually, but your point is taken. A lot of our consumer goods are produced under appalling conditions and the only reason we ignore that is that the companies producing the goods go to enormous lengths to insulate us from what's going on. This distancing is the only way to get us to continue our behavior because it blunts our natural empathy.

And I would say that the system of exploitation that gives us ultra-cheap consumer goods at the expense of people's lives is in fact sociopathic. And just because we all participate in this system, it doesn't mean it's acceptable to allow nasty behavior on a mailing list. Just because we can't fix all of the problems in the world doesn't mean we have no responsibility for fixing any of them.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 17:48 UTC (Tue) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

A lot of our consumer goods are produced under appalling conditions and the only reason we ignore that is that the companies producing the goods go to enormous lengths to insulate us from what's going on.

It's also extremely difficult to avoid because almost all manufacturers are participating to one extent or another. Just try finding modern consumer goods- or commercially produced foods- that weren't produced by exploiting vulnerable workers. Unless you're willing to more-or-less drop out of modern society, you're benefiting from exploitation.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 6:25 UTC (Wed) by mjthayer (guest, #39183) [Link]

> Just try finding modern consumer goods- or commercially produced foods- that weren't produced by exploiting vulnerable workers. Unless you're willing to more-or-less drop out of modern society, you're benefiting from exploitation.

Actually it is no longer that bad in many areas. The main issues are becoming aware of the problem (and one can be aware of some aspects without being conscious of others), finding out where to get said products and learning to accept the price premium that often but not always goes with it. Though I think computer products are still a lot harder to do ethically than food and clothing.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:38 UTC (Wed) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link] (1 responses)

Just because we can't fix all of the problems in the world doesn't mean we have no responsibility for fixing any of them.
So is it fair to start with the easiest target?
Yes, there are people enslaved to give me this shiny phone but no one will listen to my rants. So lets rally against this genius who gave the world Linux because he acts like a grumpy grand dad on mailing lists, or the other genius (who is a noble prize winner) just to make a point. It does not matter that this technology has empowered many of the poor all over the world, has real impact on global economy, and has made the world a better place for billions of people. They are easy targets because they are decent and respectful human beings, while attacking hard targets (with real human rights violations) will result in soaring oil prices which is inconvenient.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 7:37 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link]

> So is it fair to start with the easiest target?

It's called bikeshedding BTW. Looking at the length of this page...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 11:28 UTC (Wed) by jwakely (subscriber, #60262) [Link]

I agree the sociopath/psychopath suggestion is a bit over the top, but I agree with dskoll that "I only care about the quality of the end product" is an immoral position. I don't need a tangible benefit to me to want other people to be treated fairly, and I put my money where my mouth is by buying products like https://www.fairphone.com/ and http://subscribe.adbusters.org/products/blackspot (which are certainly not the highest quality goods available, but they are definitely good enough and they are produced more fairly).

Make a difference with your choices. You don't just have to accept products that are made at other people's expense, and I certainly can't agree with people who actively choose products that cause suffering just because the end result is a bit shinier.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:08 UTC (Wed) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

You might want to look up the phrase non sequitur.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:29 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (3 responses)

Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but there it is.

The author's desire to participate in Linux kernel development is a selfish goal.

My desire to have the best quality kernel possible is a selfish goal.

Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another - they are both matters of personal preference and nobody's personal preferences are binding on other people.

Nor is it the job of any person to manage the feelings of another person. The person who feels something is the owner of that feeling and managing it is their responsibility.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:01 UTC (Mon) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

The author's desire to participate in Linux kernel development is a selfish goal. My desire to have the best quality kernel possible is a selfish goal.

No, sorry. A developer giving of his or her time is not objectively as selfish as someone who just wants the fruits of their labor.

Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another - they are both matters of personal preference and nobody's personal preferences are binding on other people.

That is a strawman. You are bringing up competing goals, but competing goals are not the issue. I said that justifying or permitting bad behavior purely on the basis of a selfish goal is unethical.

Nor is it the job of any person to manage the feelings of another person.

No, it is not, and there certainly are cases where people take offense unreasonably and are hyper-sensitive. However, that doesn't give others the right to be sexist, rude, homophobic, etc. and then get a free pass by saying "don't be so sensitive!". You have to measure whether or not a reasonable person could justifiably find something offensive and use that as the basis of any decision.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:48 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]

> Neither goal is objectively better or worse than another

Well, there are unselfish goals. They're definitely objectively better.

Being able to set aside my own preferences to help other people. Putting myself in their shoes and having consideration for their state. Not behaving like a little tin god at the centre of my own universe. That sort of thing...

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:52 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link]

You don't seem to know what the word "selfish" means. It's not selfish either to want to participate in the kernel process, or to want a good kernel. It's selfish to want that regardless of its effects on other people.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:44 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (61 responses)

If you're looking for validation and warm fuzzies, there are, quite literally, millions of places you can get them.

There's only one Linux kernel, and its impact on the world is hard to overstate. A loss of code quality to make a few people feel better would be an enormous loss to the world.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:14 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (21 responses)

There is no contradiction between being civil and insisting on code quality.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:26 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (10 responses)

In a perfect would I would agree. But there are times that people just don't get it. Pretty much every time Linus blew up and it made headlines, was due to this. After lots of civil communication, the point is not getting across. People (especially Linus) will then exert a bit of nastiness. Amazingly, people usually will take a step back and look at the bigger picture when that happens. Linus's rant about ARM is a perfect example of things getting done afterward.

Motivation is driven by emotion. The more passionate you are about something, the more you work at it. Fear of being yelled at can also motivate. There was a time that I wasn't listening to a major maintainer about something and he totally ripped into me (it wasn't Linus). It took several times at being yelled at for me to get a clue. As a result, I now have probably the best personal self made test suite that I run on my code before posting any patch to linux-next. I didn't make this because of civil conversation. I made it because I was terrified of being yelled at again.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 8:39 UTC (Sat) by marcH (subscriber, #57642) [Link] (8 responses)

> There was a time that I wasn't listening to a major maintainer about something and he totally ripped into me (it wasn't Linus). It took several times at being yelled at for me to get a clue.

Thanks for sharing this, which - as has been said many times - isn't a usual type of events yet always gets reported.

I think it's possible to mitigate even these rare events: simply by switching to private communication. I know that private emails are "just bad" the vast majority of the time, but all good rules have exceptions and IMHO this is one. I mean: when everyone gets it but the person too passionate (or else) to listen, why keep in public the (lack of) dialogue? Yelling "Now will you at last listen to me?" at someone in public is orders of magnitude more embarrassing and problematic than the same thing in private, and not just because the former is archived forever.

I've heard and seen more than one manager practice: "praise publicly, criticize privately". While it does not completely apply in this context there's still a lesson to take from it.

BTW there's often reference to the higher value given to respect in Asian vs Western cultures but it's always about public contexts; curious about private exchanges.

Now of course there's the risk the tone raises up a bit higher in a private communication. It typically still feels much better than being scolded in public. And wait: who said private communication has to be email, which *everyone* knows to be flame-prone? What happened to the good old telephone? The Internet star killed it? A lot of this entire debate actually comes down to just "email sucks" for all the well known reasons - mainly lack of oxytocin: https://youtu.be/ReRcHdeUG9Y?t=2149

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 14:06 UTC (Sat) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (7 responses)

Actually, there is a lot of criticism in the private. We just don't see it because, well, it's private.

But private criticism may not work as well either. When you are in a private forum, you can make claims that just wont hold up water. But doing that in a public setting has a bigger impact and both sides really need to have the facts straight before they post. Otherwise, if you yell at someone and are incorrect yourself, you can have others yell at you. This has happened, and kept the one that was yelling in check.

Escalating to public shaming really should be the last resort, but should still be on the table. Everyone that posts code to the Linux kernel should be a little nervous about it. That nervousness keeps one in check. Once you can post code without any anxiety then you can easily post low quality code. I've been submitting code to the Linux kernel for over 10 years, and I'm still nervous with every patch I send out. That drives me to make sure my patch can stand on its own, and keeps me from doing something stupid. If you can't handle that, and want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if you totally screw up, nobody will criticize you, I'm sorry, you are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 14:09 UTC (Sat) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (2 responses)

BTW, when I said "you" at the end, I don't mean you :-) That was just a generalization. I like German because it has a separate word for that "man", which doesn't mean the English "man".

Private vs public

Posted Oct 10, 2015 15:51 UTC (Sat) by cebewee (guest, #94775) [Link]

I should be able to use "one" in (most of) those case.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:02 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

You can use "one" as a general abstract pronoun for people, as a contraction of 'someone', in conjunction with "they", "them" to reference that abstract person, etc., e.g.:

"If someone can't handle that, and they want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if they totally screw up, nobody will criticize them, I'm sorry, they are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel."

"one" just happened not to fit easily in there, but often used in "One might think", "If one wants to avoid criticism". Note that "one" can come across as a bit stilted, just using "someone" usually sounds better IMO. "someone" is pretty much the same as the germanic "jemand" / "iemand".

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:38 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (3 responses)

> If you can't handle that, and want to be able to send out "no worries" patches, where if you totally screw up, nobody will criticize you, I'm sorry, you are not fit to submit to a project as serious as the Linux kernel.

That is tantamount to saying that most people from huge chunks of the Earth (where the culture militates against public criticism of people and where people will go to great lengths to avoid such criticism) are not fit to submit to "a project as serious as the Linux kernel".

There's nothing wrong with criticizing the *patches*. There's something wrong with criticizing the *person* -- and you claim above that criticizing the person is just fine. That's pretty horrendous (if you meant it, rather than being a sloppy way of phrasing "nobody will criticize your patches". Obviously if the code is crap, you should say so, but that's not the same thing. Everyone totally screws up now and again. This does not reflect on them except to prove that they are human, and attacking them for that is wrong.)

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 19:43 UTC (Sun) by lsl (subscriber, #86508) [Link] (2 responses)

> There's nothing wrong with criticizing the *patches*. There's something wrong with criticizing the *person* -- and you claim above that criticizing the person is just fine,

I don't think criticizing a person is generally inappropriate. Sometimes the actual problem is not as much the patches but the mindset that lead to their existence. This is, I think, what Steven's saying.

If you go to great lengths to avoid it, but slip up anyway, well, that happens. The *patch* gets torn apart, you clean it up and everything's fine. But when submitters don't do their due diligence and send crap to the list where it's obvious that they didn't even bother to read the relevant docs, then that's a totally different situation. If you don't even get the most basic stuff right and send one broken patch after another, there's no point in criticizing the individual patches. Until that *person* understands that touching kernel code requires a more careful mindset, looking at the patches is just a waste of time.

So telling those submitters to stop until they change their approach to programming is not only appropriate, but desperately needed. There's more than one way to do that, of course, and no one said you're supposed to scar them for life. With a bit of empathy, you can probably do it without causing all too much pain.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 20:55 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link] (1 responses)

> ...where it's obvious that they didn't even bother to read the relevant docs....

It is *never* obvious what someone else has or hasn't done in private. "They didn't read the relevant docs" may be the simplest explanation that you can think of given your perspective and values.
But people are different and complex. And they change from moment to moment.

Maybe they didn't ready, maybe they read but misunderstood. Maybe they forgot. Maybe they were hasty and careless. Maybe they are having a bad day and they pushed the wrong branch.

That is why attacking the person is such a bad idea. What you are really attacking is your mental model of the person, which is probably quite different in many details to the actual person. You may know what they did publicly,. You never know for certain why. So only attach the actions (i.e the code) not the person.

> If you don't even get the most basic stuff right and send one broken patch after another, there's no point in criticizing the individual patches.

There certainly comes a point where criticizing the patches doesn't seem worth while. But that does not justify attacking the person.

"I'm sorry but I won't be reviewing your patches any more because doing so doesn't appear to help. If you stop posting patches here for at least one month I may then look at future patches you post. If they appear to address my previous review comments, then I may proceed with them"

This talks about what "I" will do, how I see the patches, and specific public actions that you may or may not perform. This is all safe territory. It does not say anything about "you" or the reasons for "your" behaviour. It just identifies the problem and outlines the rules for engagement.

> So telling those submitters to stop until they change their approach to programming

Make that "stop until their patches address the identified issues" and I'll agree with you.

Private vs public

Posted Oct 11, 2015 21:50 UTC (Sun) by neilbrown (subscriber, #359) [Link]

Just a quick addendum...
Modern technological cultures like ours claim to value science over superstition.

Science is about that which is observable and measurable.
Superstition is about whatever we suppose to be the case - untested by measurement.

I'm just suggestion that we should be scientific, not superstitious, in our responses to each other.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:43 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>But there are times that people just don't get it. Pretty much every time Linus blew up and it made headlines, was due to this.

He didn't get on news for being critical but because of the way it is being expressed. Yes, he usually doesn't respond that way but the price of being a celebrity (even if you wear that hat uncomfortably) is that you have to that much more careful.

>Motivation is driven by emotion. The more passionate you are about something, the more you work at it. Fear of being yelled at can also motivate

True but studies have shown that intrinsic motivation is often more powerful compared to external pressure. If you are involved in development in a public way, you should be open to public criticism. That by itself isn't the problem. You do have to watch out for how you do it though. You can very easily drive off other contributors by doing it poorly.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:42 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link] (9 responses)

I will admit that not everyone can work in that type of environment. Sarah obviously has the talent for kernel development, but unfortunately, she is not one that can work in this environment.

There's talk about weighing "code quality" with "human wellness". I had this conversation with someone in Seattle, and at first I couldn't find a reply. Then later I was in a room where the presenter was talking about all the things that were using Linux to solve medical diseases, and such. Then it hit me. Quality of code is directly related to "human wellness". When the quality is not there, people can die. Whether directly or indirectly, Linux is used to save lives.

Try going into the medical field (several of my friends are). You think LKML is nasty? Residents are very much belittled in order for them to understand the full seriousness of their job. The more serious the project is, the harsher the environment.

The problem with Linux is that it is not a company. If someone is constantly sending in abysmal code, there's no performance review to correct that. Same goes to someone not following the standards. The only real tactic we have is to yell at someone. Otherwise you may waste days, weeks or months trying to be civil about it. As Linus always states, "in the internet, nobody can hear you being subtle".

Note, most of the time, civil conversation is all that is needed. The yelling is the exception and not the norm. Read LKML or even just Linus's emails. You'll find them mostly boring. It's only those rare occurrences that things had to escalate to set things straight again. Unfortunately news sites don't talk about the 1000's of boring "civil" emails. They only hone in on the one rant where civility didn't work.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 11, 2015 16:41 UTC (Sun) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (8 responses)

But Sarah was *not* sending in absymal code, so it seems unlikely she was getting too much criticism herself. What you're saying is that if you can't cope with the stress of watching others be publically belittled (and it *is* stressful), sod off, we don't want you no matter how good a developer you are?

I have to say, any company I've ever heard of that had that policy would have been sued into the ground by now by ex-employees, and rightly so.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 15:53 UTC (Mon) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (7 responses)

>But Sarah was *not* sending in absymal code, [...]

She was, though. A "simple, trivial" patch, rejected off-hand for being obviously broken, with a comment to the effect of "did you even compile this?".

Look it up. It concerns USB3, of course.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:34 UTC (Mon) by PaXTeam (guest, #24616) [Link] (6 responses)

> Asked for evidence, a concrete reference to the public communication by which the condemners formed their opinion, what do they answer? "Go search for it yourself."

the irony is just too rich.

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Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:41 UTC (Mon) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (3 responses)

Ha, that is funny. The reference: https://lwn.net/Articles/660365/

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Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:42 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Funny or not, it's looking to me like it might be about time to close the door on this discussion. I think the important stuff has been said at this point...

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Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:52 UTC (Mon) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

while I agree that the important stuff has probably been said, has this been open to non-subscribers? (today it would have come out of the escrow so I'm not sure)

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Posted Oct 12, 2015 22:59 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

This wasn't a feature article, so it's been open to the world since it was first posted.

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Posted Oct 18, 2015 11:14 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, you could've asked.

Sheesh.

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Posted Oct 18, 2015 17:45 UTC (Sun) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Are you reading what you're writing? Obviously that applies to you too.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (38 responses)

You (and others) keep bringing up a false dichotomy. Behaving decently is not incompatible with producing an excellent kernel.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:09 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (4 responses)

We're not, though, in the sense that you're explicitly prioritizing people's feelings over every other consideration.

We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

The code comes first. If it doesn't, there's no point to writing it. There's nothing wrong with being polite, but by your loudly stated goals, it would be best to wreck the code if that resulted in more civil behavior.

That would be an extraordinarily bad idea. Design correctness and code quality are what matter most, and developers should be as polite as possible within that constraint.

Honestly, it's probably not that severe a constraint. But the code comes first. It has to. Your stated priorities are more than a little scary.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 16:50 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

You can keep repeating that to yourself louder and louder but it still isn't true, being an a**hole to people does not bring the best work from people, or attract the most competent people, what brings quality is competent people who are invested in a goal, projects with a**holes operate in spite the productivity drain, drama and distraction from the goal they cause and not because of it. It is in fact possible to be highly critical and demand quality without either being an a**hole or being crippled with an inability to give feedback due to fear of other peoples egos, it's not being an a**hole to reject a patch due to it not meeting the quality standards or pointing out the problems with a design.

> But the code comes first. It has to.

You act as if there is some absolute quantifiable rank that every other consideration is subservient to, but that is not how anything in life works, there are always multiple competing factors and trade-offs to be made between them, and every priority is only the "first" priority to a point.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:00 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

No, I am not "explicitly prioritizing people's feelings over every other consideration". I cannot for the life of me see how you've read that into anything I'm saying. I did say that people are more important than code and I stand by that.

We can all feel wonderful about ourselves, and put out a worthless project.

Once again, the logical fallacy of false dichotomy. This is really getting tiresome. Using "the code must come first!" as an excuse for disgusting behavior is lame. It's simply a distraction scheme to get people to stop thinking about the pervasiveness of aggression and rudeness in some open-source development projects.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 23:15 UTC (Wed) by luto (subscriber, #39314) [Link]

> The code comes first. If it doesn't, there's no point to writing it. There's nothing wrong with being polite, but by your loudly stated goals, it would be best to wreck the code if that resulted in more civil behavior.

I've reviewed plenty of code that might be, in the words of some people, excrement of some sort. This includes a lot of code that I really don't want to see in the kernel as is. If I review code that I don't want to see in the kernel, I often speak up.

Nonetheless, I've tried to do my best not to personally insult the people who write such code. Some of them are great contributors who add a lot of direct value to the community and to the code base. All of them, without exception, are human beings who ought to be entitled to better treatment than being shat on, whether on a mailing list or otherwise. [1]

It's more than possible that I've still said things that I probably shouldn't have said. Once or twice, I've typed a nasty email, but I think I've done a pretty good job of letting those nasty emails languish in my drafts folder.

So, yes, code reviewers should speak up, but speaking up does not require opining that a piece of code was written by an [insert derogatory term here] or came out of some orifice or other.

[1] There's actually a robot that sends me patches on occasion. They tend to be of remarkably high quality, and the people who feed said robot should be commended. Nonetheless, if the robot were to send me a bad patch, I would try to avoid insulting its parents.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 19:04 UTC (Thu) by PaulMcKenney (✭ supporter ✭, #9624) [Link]

> The code comes first.

Instead of attempting to prioritize people against code, I suggest prioritizing groups of people against other groups of people. In the case of the Linux kernel, this might mean prioritizing the needs of the users of the code against those of the developers of that code.

This is not a simple tradeoff, and different communities are going to choose differently. For the tiny piece of the Linux kernel that I maintain, I try to meet the needs of both groups. Being human, I don't always succeed. But if someone forces me to make a choice, I must prioritize the needs of the users over those of the developers. Naturally, I expect to increasingly favor the users over the developers as the Linux kernel sees increasing usage in safety-critical systems. After all, although I don't feel good when my interactions with other developers falls short, I suspect that I would feel far worse if my code ended up killing someone.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 15:10 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (32 responses)

Also possibly worth pointing out: you're the one banging the drum about politeness, and then calling people sociopaths in the next breath.

You may not be the best spokesperson for the issue.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 16:57 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

Pointing out the truth, the comments by jack represented an anti-social worldview, is not impolite, but your comment represents a fundamental misunderstanding of what politeness means for people with conflicting ideas, politeness doesn't demand subservience to the loudest talker in a room just to avoid conflict.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 17:09 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> politeness doesn't demand subservience to the loudest talker in a room just to avoid conflict.

It may not require it, but that's the typical outcome nonetheless.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 18:01 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (29 responses)

I very politely called someone who prioritizes his or her own selfish interests above all other considerations a sociopath/psychopath. I believe I was merely repeating the dictionary definition.

Don't try to deflect the argument, please.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 22:04 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (28 responses)

> I very politely called someone [for reasons] a sociopath/psychopath.

Yeah, okay, whatever. I think you've just disqualified yourself from the discussion.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 22:39 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (26 responses)

Please don't bring selective edits to LWN. That's an awful way to discuss things.

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Posted Oct 7, 2015 23:03 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (25 responses)

Eliding the dependent clause to highlight the main part of the sentence seems quite reasonable to me. I suppose I could have used HTML highlighting, but the original text is right there, and it's not exactly a long comment.

The upshot is that if you're calling someone a sociopath, particularly in a thread about politeness, you are way off the reservation. And failing to back down when it's pointed out, instead doubling down on the rudeness, strikes me as a total disqualifier from this particular conversation. If you cannot recognize the behavior in yourself, you shouldn't be throwing stones at others.

It's also, perhaps, worth pointing out that the target of the sociopath comment was expressing one of the most fundamental values of the free software community: he wants to scratch his own itch.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 2:00 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (21 responses)

The very definition of a sociopath or psychopath embraces someone who puts his or her own goals ahead of everything else and sublimates or ignores or indeed cannot even sense other people's feelings. That's what the person I was replying to was talking about.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 3:17 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

So, in other words, it's perfectly okay to call someone a sociopath, as long as you're really sure you're right?

You do realize that your exact argument applies to most of the negative interactions that you claim to hate so fervently? You are doing precisely, exactly what you say is bad behavior, but gosh, Wally, it's okay for me, because I'm right.

That's probably what's going through the mind of everyone being insulting online.... if they're even aware it's an insult, well, it's justified, because they're correct about how terrible a coder their target is, or how awful a behavior that was, or what a pile of wreckage their ethical standards must be.

It seems to me that if you're going to try to impose a code of behavior on others, the very first step needs to be holding yourself to at least that strict a standard, and preferably one much stricter.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 12:37 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (19 responses)

"That's what the person I was replying to was talking about."

"ahead of everything else ... ignores ... cannot sense ..."
No, you're exaggerating in order to silence him with some armchair psychiatry.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:06 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (18 responses)

So, it's okay to call people sociopaths when you don't agree with them?

In threads about civility??

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:09 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (1 responses)

(Sorry, that was a misthreaded reply to dskoll.)

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:20 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Ah, okay, that makes more sense.

Yeah, it's easy to get lost in the narrow indendation in LWN threads, but it makes them a lot more readable most of the time, so the occasional bit of confusion is probably worth it.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:51 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (15 responses)

What I wrote was this:

Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath

and I stand by it.

Next, your creative little editing of my quote was the equivalent of this:

Original: "People who murder for fun and profit are evil."

Creatively quoted: "People who [do something] are evil."

So yeah... I stand by what I said and I think you are being disingenuous.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 13:59 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (14 responses)

Well, okay, you've tripled down on your abusive behavior, so I'll just leave it to the readers to judge.

This, folks, is the world he's championing: he gets to be abusive, because he's right, you see.... but other people don't.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:07 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (12 responses)

...he gets to be abusive, because he's right, you see.... but other people don't.

She, not he.

And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive. I doubt jackb really is sociopathic. I'm sure he's a really nice person in real life as are most people who get involved in online discussions.

I was merely pointing out the logical consequences of the belief that only the code matters and that everything else should be subservient to code quality.

I'm done with this particular subthread because I doubt we'll ever see each other's point of view. Have a good day.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:14 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (4 responses)

"She, not he. "

Is it relevant to the discussion at hand ?

"You are simply being over-sensitive."

Is that a joke ? If it was the other way around you would be screaming bloody-murder, denouncing a 'blaming the victim' situation.

"I doubt we'll ever see each other's point of view"
Oh but we see it, do not worry.. you seems to be impervious to the fact that your position is asymmetric.
Everything you reproach to Linus, your are doing and more.. but of course in your case it is different.. because _you_ are right!

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 18:01 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (3 responses)

Is it (she vs. he) relevant to the discussion at hand ?

Not particularly, but I do strive for accuracy.

Is that a joke ? If it was the other way around you would be screaming bloody-murder, denouncing a 'blaming the victim' situation.

Congrats; you got it. It wasn't specifically a joke, but it was a pointed comment to make malor understand a little better.

Everything you reproach to Linus,

The remarks to which malor so strenuously objected were not aimed at Linus. I was simply saying that pursuing one's selfish interest above all others' feelings is the mark of a sociopath. I don't believe Linus does this nor actually anyone else on the LKML. I was just trying to point out the logical consequence of believing that the only thing that matters is code quality. I'm attacking that idea, not any specific person. I'm sorry if that hasn't been clear during this discussion.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:04 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (2 responses)

"Not particularly, but I do strive for accuracy. "
you strive for accuracy over irrelevant details ?
Beside this is the internet, for all I know you could be one of these reviled 'ex-young-geek-now-white-middle-man', or an 80 years old grandma from Indonesia, or a teenage transgender from Cameroon. The good news is that none of it matter nor has any bearing on the validity or lack there-thereof of your argument. But it beg the question... why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia ?

"Congrats; you got it."

no, do not get me wrong. Me pointing out that you should at the very least hold yourself to the standard that you aim to impose on others, does not in any way, shape or form imply that I accept such 'standard' as valid.
I find the whole 'right not be offended' meme whereas the lowest common denominator of all readers or imagined readers is the unimpeachable standard of what is 'acceptable', idiotic and impossible to apply.. as your foray in sociopatic behavior definition illustrated pointedly.

"The remarks to which malor so strenuously objected were not aimed at Linus"
of course it was not... When I said 'everything you reproach to Linux' I was referring to your style of discourse, and the justification for it is exactly the style you reproach to Linus - albeit with a more passive-aggressive tone, and contrary to Linux you do not own-up your discourse.

I do not care if you resort to name-calling, I bet malor does not really either..
What I care about, in this instance, is the hypocrisy, the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do attitude.... whereas Linus is not allowed to chose the tone he wants, and need to account for all sort of potentially offended peoples.. but _you_ are dispensed of such considerations.

I'll give you a US political analogy:

you can have whatever sexual lifestyle as you want, I do not care
you can preach all day long that some of these styles are a road to hell according to your favorite imaginary friend.. I do not care -- well, as long as you do not try to coerce me into sharing your delusions.
but when you do both at the same time... you will get called on it, even by people that do not care about either.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:34 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Wow, I guess you get offended really easily.

> why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia?

To correct a pronoun, obviously.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 12:11 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

why do you feel compelled to insist on irrelevant alleged trivia

OK, ma'am. I'll stop. shmget shows her focus on the topic by not caring which pronoun is used to refer to her.

Anyway, this really is going nowhere. You can't accept that I'm criticizing a philosophy, not a particular person. So we're done.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:14 UTC (Thu) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link]

> And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive.

The point malor is making (I believe) is, that's exactly the same argument being made by many of the people defending the status quo on LKML.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 2:15 UTC (Fri) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (5 responses)

And no, I am not being abusive. You are simply being over-sensitive.

Are you even reading yourself?

I mean, you could be on LKML right now. You sound exactly like the people you profess to dislike. You're jumping up and down about protecting people's feelings, and then you post things like that.

Something seems quite amiss here. Are you trolling?

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 5:13 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

> You sound exactly like the people you profess to dislike.

Are you gaslighting or putting on a performance for the crowd of some schoolyard taunt, "I know you are but what am I", like a culture warrior behind a paper shield of false "both sides doitism". Maybe you have such cripplingly sensitive feelings as to make you incapable of engaging in an honest and open conversation about this topic, to the point where you consider dskoll's mild tone and criticisms to be abusive. I think I understand your point enough that I can't take your stated position that dskoll has abused you very seriously, it seems more likely that you in fact are trolling than the other way around.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 12:13 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

*sigh*. I guess no-one really got my "you are over-senstive" comment. Of course I was being ironic. Sheesh.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 18:30 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (2 responses)

I will remind you that your whole argument depends on selective editing. The sentence you've been harping on for ages (in its original form, obviously) might be overly harsh, but it isn't terribly offensive. It's certainly not worth all the effort you've put in.

If you're wondering who's trolling here, well, it might be you.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:23 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"The sentence you've been harping on for ages (in its original form, obviously) might be overly harsh, but it isn't terribly offensive."

But the argument of dskull and few others is that you or anyone else is not allowed to determine _what_ is offensive.. if you do, you are accused of 'blaming the victim'. In their world, whomever complain is de facto right to complain, the complain is, ipso facto, proof positive that there _is_ a 'problem'... denying the premises make you part of _the_ problem and not part of _the_ solution (to the alleged problem)... and of course they have 'the solution' ready. And dare you not challenge it you sexist-middle-age-white-chauvinistic-privileged-sociopathic-pig....

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 21:02 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

Please show me an actual person offended by dskoll's actual statement?

Gotta say, this has turned into a weird conversation. I disliked her statement, but I also dislike how you two have boiled up a sea of hypotheticals and implications around it. I don't get it. Probably time for me to tune out.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 17:18 UTC (Thu) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

I don't see how this can be considered abusive, unless you consider any challenge to your ideas to be abuse. If you want to be in an environment where no one ever questions your thoughts then maybe LWN isn't the place you want to be?

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 2:02 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (2 responses)

he wants to scratch his own itch

What? No. He wants others to scratch his itch for him, no matter how badly they're treated. You are completely taking things out of context. Please go back and read the article that elicited my initial response.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 3:27 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link] (1 responses)

>What? No. He wants others to scratch his itch for him, no matter how badly they're treated. You are completely taking things out of context. Please go back and read the article that elicited my initial response.

Well, the specific quote that you pulled out, and called him a sociopath for, was this:

>If you're unable or unwilling to do this, then you'll have to work on achieving your preferences without my help, and possibly while I am helping people who are trying to achieve an opposite preference because they did make a convincing case.

What he's saying is this: he wants good quality code. That's his itch. If you convince him that your approach results in better code, he'll lend whatever help he has to offer. (he will help you scratch your itch because it helps him scratch his.) If someone else convinces him that their approach will produce better code, he'll help that person. (he'll scratch their itch because it helps him scratch his.)

This is one of the most fundamental parts of open source. People see a problem and want to solve it, and team up with other people who want to achieve similar goals. If he's a sociopath, then most of open source is, as well.

As far as I can see, not only are you way out of bounds on polite behavior, but also incorrect in your accusation. All he's saying is: "I want a good product. I'll support whoever convinces me their approach does that better."

And instead of trying to convince him, which is what he's asking you to do, you call him a sociopath.

In a thread about toxic behavior, no less.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 16:58 UTC (Fri) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

> And instead of trying to convince him, which is what he's asking you to do, you call him a sociopath.

OK, so did I miss something? He was never called a sociopath. This seems to be the quote this whole thread spawned from:

> Showing such disregard for people's feelings in relation to some selfish goal is something I'd expect from a sociopath or a psychopath.

There's nothing here about a *person* being a sociopath, but *behaviors* being sociopathic in nature. One may have behaviors which indicate all kinds of mental afflictions or other problems without actually having the problem itself (e.g., nervous ticks can be *indicators* of OCD, but are not a diagnosis[1]).

Is there some other comment I missed here?

[1]Actual OCD can be *debilitating* whereas what is called OCD in common terms is usually nothing of the sort. Dislike of light switches not being "all the same way" is not the same as severe anxiety attacks about them not having been turned off "right" while you're out shopping.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:10 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> > I very politely called someone [for reasons] a sociopath/psychopath.

> Yeah, okay, whatever. I think you've just disqualified yourself from the discussion.

Excluding someone for telling a truth (however unpleasant) rather disqualifies the discussion from having a point, don't you think?

There are polite and nasty ways of saying things, but I think dskoll was putting it politely. And if you can't accept unpleasant facts, politely put, then you shouldn't be discussing that sort of thing ...

Cheers,
Wol

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:45 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (9 responses)

I personally find the attitude extremely realistic and liberating, even if it's explained a bit poorly. It's akin to being asked elide your person entirely, and just focus yourself to become a machine that best performs a given job. It's a rational position, not an immoral one.

Few people are impacted if the feelings of some random developer are hurt, but a very large number benefit if the product is good. In the end, that code may live a decade or longer, and benefit literally billions over its time span, whereas such personal feelings come and go and largely are irrelevant in comparison. This problem is, I think, in similar category to the ethics of making one person suffer more so that million more people can be a bit happier on average -- from an utilitarian point of view even a minor improvement in the lives of the multitude outweigh even large displeasure heaped on a single person.

So anyway, I feel this is a bit tangential to the discussion, but I do think that the code is way more important than the people because of how much larger impact it has, and how many more lives it affects.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 20:15 UTC (Thu) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (8 responses)

But ultimately, you're agreeing with me that the code is only important because of the good that it brings to people. If you had absolutely beautiful code that didn't benefit any people, then you'd agree with me that the code wasn't worth very much except maybe as an aesthetic object.

Now, the thing is that you can have beautiful code that benefits millions of people and whose development hurts "some random developer". But wouldn't it be better to have beautiful code that benefits millions of people and whose development is less hurtful to "random developers"?

In a slightly more subtle way, you yet again appeal to the same false dichotomy as others attempting to justify bad behavior: That we can have either good code or good behavior but not both.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:19 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (7 responses)

"others attempting to justify bad behavior:"

I think what you are persistently missing is that we are not in agreement wrt what constitute 'bad behaviour'.
You assume that 'your' views on the topic are universal.. that we all would be happier in an hypocritical, repressed environment, were conflict is left to fester and handled via backstabbing, rumor mills, and other passive-aggressive, superficially polite ways.

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:32 UTC (Thu) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (3 responses)

Ms. Sharp has made a followup posting, some of which may be interpreted as her assessment of "bad behavior". It includes references to "microaggressions" and "known harassers" and "code of conduct" and "leadership ... at least 30% new voices" and "spectrum of privilege" and "cultural change" and of course many variants of "diversity".

http://sarah.thesharps.us/2015/10/06/what-makes-a-good-co...

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Posted Oct 8, 2015 21:42 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (2 responses)

Her list sounds horrible to me, because it requires kicking your experience, enthusiastic, productive people out periodically to make room for 'new' people (both in development and in 'leadership')

The Linux Kernel community hits most things in most categories of her list, but there are also a lot of things that are subjective.

She then seems to say that unless every item in every category is met, she deems the whole category and effort a failure.

She's welcome to try and organize and run a project per her criteria, but I don't think I would want to operate under those rules.

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Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:34 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Her list sounds horrible to me, because it requires kicking your experience, enthusiastic, productive people out periodically to make room for 'new' people (both in development and in 'leadership')

Unfortunately, here in the real world, all the evidence is that having someone in the same position of leadership for a long time results in that person becoming a real problem :-( There is a REASON that most democracies limit the amount of time a person can be President or whatever for. I used to be a fan of Margaret Thatcher. Until she developed Maggielomania. MOST leaders get to the point where they like power, and will hang on to it come hell or high water.

How long has Linus headed the Linux project? He seems to have kept himself remarkably grounded, but he's been around a heck of a long time. Too long? I don't know, but all the stats say yes, too long. ESR has burnt himself out, he's no longer that respected. RMS seems to be shooting himself in the foot far too often today :-( I hate to say it, but I think more and more long-time luminaries can no longer see the wood for the trees :-(

As a chemist, one historic example I like is Dalton. As a student and a young man, he was a remarkable scientist. As a respected elder sage, he was one big unmitigated disaster, holding back Chemistry for ages.

A possible counter-example is Churchill, but he regularly swung between power and political wilderness - that was probably a great help in keeping his feet on the ground.

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:52 UTC (Fri) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

The reason I believe that Linus is still around and doesn't look anywhere close to burning out, is because he never micromanages. He gives maintainers lots of room to run their subsystems the way they seem fit. When there's in-fights within a subsystem, or competing systems, he doesn't get involved unless one side is totally off the mark and isn't changing. He's stated before that he doesn't want to get involved in those controversies, and wants the subsystems to figure things out themselves.

His biggest pet peeve (and he restated it again in Dublin), is breaking backward compatibility with user space. The majority of his rants that make headlines has mostly been due to maintainers thinking they could break a user application in the next release for whatever reason. Push that too much, and you will suffer the wrath of Linus. And usually for good reason too.

Linus has been very consistent in his leadership. I don't see him stepping down any time soon.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 22:20 UTC (Thu) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link] (2 responses)

Your reply calls to mind the old adage "If you are not part of the solution, then you are part of the problem". The people pointing to a problem, of whom Sharp is just one recent example, most certainly are aware that their criteria for bad behaviour are not shared universally. If there were universal agreement, there would not be a problem.

Nor is it likely that the people pointing to a problem believe that any single standard or code of behaviour will make everyone happy. But "you can't please everyone" is a very weak defense for a status quo where many people are unhappy, or where many people who perceive that they would be unhappy if they joined choose to stay away altogether.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 23:07 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

by the same argument, there are a lot of people who are happy with the current situation and who have said they would be very unhappy with the proposed rules

so for them, the people annoying them about changes that they don't want are the problem.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 15, 2015 8:45 UTC (Thu) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link]

The people pointing to a problem, of whom Sharp is just one recent example, most certainly are aware that their criteria for bad behaviour are not shared universally. If there were universal agreement, there would not be a problem.
Oh, they are pretty much shared universally. It's just that some misshapen person cult tends to glorify some "hero's" bad traits along with the rest until he as well as others relish in considering them a mark of quality.

It's like greed and selfishness being glorified because you admire the effects of being rich.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:48 UTC (Mon) by fredrik (subscriber, #232) [Link] (66 responses)

If you want the highest quality achievable in the kernel, you want a large group of people working efficiently on improving the kernel. You do not want to limit yourself to only people with very thick skin, or people that doesn't care that they offend and induce fear into others rather than giving them constructive feedback. Fear doesn't improve productivity, especially not in creative work.

If highly qualified people leave or never even enters the community of contributing kernel developers - because they perceive the kernel community as lacking in personal respect - the overall quality of the kernel will be less than if the community included those people.

As a side note, I'd like to point out that quality is a collective measure of many separate quality attributes. It isn't far fetched to consider interpersonal behaviour between developers and general community attitude as quality attributes among others - just like efficiency, hardware support, serviceability, etc. If you want to score high on overall quality, you want to score high on all individual attributes including civility.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 18:57 UTC (Mon) by jackb (guest, #41909) [Link] (65 responses)

If you want the highest quality achievable in the kernel, you want a large group of people working efficiently on improving the kernel. You do not want to limit yourself to only people with very thick skin, or people that doesn't care that they offend and induce fear into others rather than giving them constructive feedback. Fear doesn't improve productivity, especially not in creative work.

If highly qualified people leave or never even enters the community of contributing kernel developers - because they perceive the kernel community as lacking in personal respect - the overall quality of the kernel will be less than if the community included those people.

This is a perfectly valid hypothesis.

Do you have any evidence that your hypothesis is true?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:19 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (40 responses)

Common sense? The extraordinary hypothesis demanding proof here is surely that having extra-thick skin or being pointlessly offensive makes you a better kernel hacker than anyone without those attributes (or even than most people without them).

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 19:51 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (32 responses)

Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 20:55 UTC (Mon) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (23 responses)

Not necessarily. It might be make you more tone deaf or less sympathetic when people complain about the development environment and even turn against the person raising the issue as opposed to changing the environment to be more suitable for everyone involved.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:21 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (22 responses)

> Not necessarily. It might be make you more tone deaf or less sympathetic when people complain about the development environment and even turn against the person raising the issue as opposed to changing the environment to be more suitable for everyone involved.

I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile. (Or forcing said change, in extreme cases).

(See, that's the problem with sociology as a field of study; there are laws that prevent performing directed, controlled experiments so all you can do is analyze uncontrolled environments after the fact)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 0:36 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (17 responses)

>I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile.

That would be true if this was a new issue. The question of poor tone in LKML has been brought up multiple times by several kernel developers and several people have said that they have either left or not joined kernel development because of said environment or they are working on it despite it and not because of it.

Projects that are generally less abrasive welcome and sustain more diverse contributions. That has been demonstrated many times. Rust and KDE were mentioned as examples in this thread but one could easily cite more projects that do it very well.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:09 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (16 responses)

>>I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile.
> That would be true if this was a new issue. The question of poor tone in LKML has been brought up multiple times by several kernel developers and several people have said that they have either left or not joined kernel development because of said environment or they are working on it despite it and not because of it.

Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

> Projects that are generally less abrasive welcome and sustain more diverse contributions. That has been demonstrated many times. Rust and KDE were mentioned as examples in this thread but one could easily cite more projects that do it very well.

I don't deny that a less abrasive environment would be be better for specific individuals, which in turn could indirectly lead to "more diverse contributions", but would said contributions actually result in an objectively better kernel?

...It's a legitimate question (and if we're being honest, an unanswerable one)

I generally take the position that diversity is a GoodThing(tm) -- But it's foolish to assume that "change this one thing" won't have additional side-effects beyond the ones you're looking for.

Personally, I don't find the LKML environment appealing -- not because of the occasional flaming (I've been the indirect recipient of it twice, incidentally) but because it's a frantic, high-pressure environment, and much like Ms. Sharp, I don't need that sort of stress in my life. Unfortunately, I'm of the growing opinion that these hostile environments are endemic to the profession of software development. In the past fifteen years I've been doing this, I've only seen it get worse and I look forward to the day when I can leave it all behind.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:42 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

>Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

Very likely, yes. We have several specific examples of talented kernel developers leaving the kernel because of the tone in the kernel development community. Just avoiding that would have already resulted in a better project. We can also demonstrate that similar approaches in other open source projects has been positive. We can't demonstrate that it would beneficial to the kernel specifically without making the change. That is true of any changes. Even technical ones. For example: can you demonstrate that testing would result in better software for any given new software without any tests? Very likely, yes but no guarantee. Now social changes are harder than technical changes but the same underlying principles apply.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 15:59 UTC (Thu) by alankila (guest, #47141) [Link] (1 responses)

> Just avoiding that would have already resulted in a better project.

Provided no other adverse outcomes occurred as a result of how this was achieved. It is unlikely that we could e.g. institute a code of conduct on LKML, and a "police force" which can enforce it without also impacting it negatively somehow, e.g. each time this police force steps in and enforces a CoC, it might apply quite mindless set of criteria to determine if CoC is violated followed by a process of escalation that eventually would remove anyone from the kernel development community, up to Linus himself. This is sort of bureaucracy and enforced niceness is always stifling in some sense even if its intentions are good.

> For example: can you demonstrate that testing would result in better software for any given new software without any tests?

Possibly, but writing the tests takes time that would be removed from other development. Maybe the quality is better, but functionality is less.

There is no free lunch. I think these repeated discussions about tone of the LKML are also a harm per se because they are also likely to scare off any new developers because they now expect to be flamed and have their mother and pet dog insulted, regardless of whether this actually would happen to them.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 16:36 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

>There is no free lunch. I think these repeated discussions about tone of the LKML are also a harm per se

If you say pollute a river, the harm is because of the pollution and not because a news outlet publishes the story.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:43 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I feel we're a at this point now : what if we made LKML a better place for nothing ?

(stealing from http://www.gocomics.com/joelpett/2009/12/13/)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 18:23 UTC (Tue) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (11 responses)

Be that as it may, would said change actually be *worthwhile* to the Kernel as a whole?

That is the wrong question. If the Kernel is the ultimate good against which all other goods are subordinate, then we've lost. If that were the case, it would be possible to justify any sort of behavior up to and including genocide as long as it improved the Kernel.

What we need to realize is that people are more important than anything else and sometimes changes are needed because they're the right thing to do, and not because they can be proven to improve the Kernel.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 19:58 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (10 responses)

" sometimes changes are needed because they're the right thing to do, "

But that is not the case here.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:21 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (9 responses)

>it is obviously _not_ better for _everyone_ involved.

>But that is not the case here.

and so on. It would help to explain your perspective rather than just assert.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 21:12 UTC (Tue) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (8 responses)

" It would help to explain your perspective rather than just assert. "

a story about pots and kettles come to mind... the point here was to counter the often asserted claim of 'right thing'

but if you want more details.. Linus already expressed thing quite adequately
in a thread already posted here.

http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=137392506516022&...

fell free to navigate in the thread in question, most of the point and counter point have been made there already....

If that did not give a hint that what some people here claim is 'The Right Thing(tm)', may not be that a slam dunk, I do not think I can convince you otherwise.

If you care about the more fundamental rooting of my position. In this topic it boils down to my strongly held belief that 'the right not to be offended' is a moronic, impossible to apply concept.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:51 UTC (Tue) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (2 responses)

>If that did not give a hint that what some people here claim is 'The Right Thing(tm)', may not be that a slam dunk, I do not think I can convince you otherwise.

Yes because Linus approach is precisely what some people here disagree with. Pointing to him is not going to convince them.

>In this topic it boils down to my strongly held belief that 'the right not to be offended' is a moronic, impossible to apply concept.

True but irrelevant since noone here has claimed otherwise.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 8:02 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"Yes because Linus approach is precisely what some people here disagree with. Pointing to him is not going to convince them."

Sure, you can decide to ignore the argument, but then you cannot complain that such argument is not given.

I certainly read that 'some people' disagree with it, that does not means that it is not correct, or that the opposing view is ipso facto the 'Right Thing(tm)'

"True but irrelevant since noone here has claimed otherwise."
Of course that has been claimed, many, many times in this debate. It is the core foundation of the argument that speech mush be judged by each and every witness to the speech... not only the one it is addressed too but also real or hypothetical bystander. and that judgement must be based on the level of offense claimed by each and every one of them.
and merely 'feeling uncomfortable' is standing enough to have a cause of action.... iow a 'right not to be offended'
you can tip-toe around the wording as much as you like, but it is still what it is.

An analogy to this ludicrous thing is these people that leave the city to get a house in farmland, and then sue for nuisance the neighboring farmers, because their cows block the road, the roster sing at dawn, the stench in the autumn when the farmer spread manure in the fields, etc... you knew or should have known that this was the reality of farmland...

If you really love so much the hypocritical, passive-aggressive political correctness of Corporate America.. good for you... you already have a huge playing field... stay there and do not try to ruin it for the rest of us.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 12:02 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

I am not ignoring it but letting you know why it is not convincing to point to linus when asked your perspective.

Also you are setting up a strawman. I will stick to the points in this thread.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 2:51 UTC (Wed) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link] (4 responses)

There is no right not to be offended. Such a "right" would itself be offensive because it would stifle free speech.

That does not mean it's OK to be crude and offensive. It would not be tolerated in a work environment---a perpetrator would justifiably be fired for creating a toxic workplace---and it should not be tolerated in an open-source development environment. Especially when there's a power imbalance, aggressive behavior can cause real damage.

It's far too convenient for people to behave disgustingly and then say "well, you're the one getting offended so it's your problem." Nope, I don't buy it and neither do most civilized people.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 17:48 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> There is no right not to be offended. Such a "right" would itself be offensive because it would stifle free speech.

I hate all this stuff about "rights". Your "rights" probably infringe my "rights".

Far better - it is your DUTY as civilised person, not to be offensive. As a CONSEQUENCE, you are unlikely to be offended.

I don't like "do as you would be done by" - the obvious problem with this is that lkml, and lwn, and places like that are mostly an "old boys club" and us men are only too happy to treat everyone else here as a bloke - then we wonder why people like Ms Sharp and dskoll find the place very hostile and uninviting ... :-(

At the end of the day, it boils down to respect. And sadly, it seems far too many people have no respect for other people. And yes, that does prove dskoll's point - as I understand, what she has been saying all along is "your behaviour fits the dictionary definition of a sociopath". That's not calling some ONE a sociopath - that's calling someone's BEHAVIOUR sociopathic, and imho she's right on the button. THAT is what needs to be addressed. And that's not a personal attack, that's a technical assault on a problem ...

And, of course, unfortunately we do have a "blame the victim" mentality - we have the thread elsewhere of the "wannabee developer" - HIS behaviour is sociopathic, and when some poor kernel guy blows his top and swears, HE's the guy who gets picked on for bad behaviour :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 19:50 UTC (Fri) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (2 responses)

"what she has been saying all along is "your behaviour fits the dictionary definition of a sociopath". That's not calling some ONE a sociopath - that's calling someone's BEHAVIOUR sociopathic, and imho she's right on the button."

No, just no.

She's inflating the degree of stated "I care only about code" to ridiculous extremes (as needed for a clinical diagnosis), instead of assuming reasonableness. She proceeds to label the behaviour with mental illness. (It is sophistry to claim only a behaviour and not the person is being labelled.)

If the deflection was going to be ... "oh, it's only consistent with $illness, not necessarily $illness", hold up. Conflict is "consistent with" genocide too, but it would be manipulative and dishonest to use the extreme term.

So, no. Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that. Don't pretend to believe they do. Don't label them mentally ill.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:27 UTC (Fri) by dskoll (subscriber, #1630) [Link]

Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that.

Exactly, and that's my point. Saying that is ridiculous. We all care about other things.

The only points of contention are (1) the relative merits of good code vs. good behavior and (2) the extent (if any) to which bad behavior is necessary to produce good code. But saying you "only" care about code is shutting down the discussion. People can legitimately have different viewpoints about (1) and (2), but the extremes (only caring about code or only caring about feelings) are ridiculous.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 20:49 UTC (Fri) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> Someone who says they "care only about code" is not meaning literally that.

So everyone agrees that someone who cares only about code does not actually exist.

According to Wol, that leaves nobody to get offended. According to fuhchee, if we paint with a wider brush, we can find lots of people to get offended. Both positions seem valid.

That said, a person claiming they 'care only about code' seems just as guilty of sophistry as the person labelling that behavior sociopathic. Both sides are overstating their positions and looking for a reaction.

So why not roll your eyes, give everyone the benefit of the doubt, and move on to a less hypothetical offense?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 8:49 UTC (Tue) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (3 responses)

> I hate to say it, but the ones seeking to impose a change bear the burden of demonstrating that said change would be worthwhile. (Or forcing said change, in extreme cases).

Given the constant whining from the kernel community about the broken whole architecture trees are (because people don't want the hassle of committing upstream), or that the kernel just lost the only person who stepped up to make sure we got USB3 support, I would say there's plenty of support things are broken.

This fine publication has reported that one third of embedded developers don't upstream because of fear of rejection noting that "Kernel subsystem maintainers tend to be strict and terse with contributors [...] If a contributor gets a reputation for submitting bad patches and wasting maintainer time, their life will get worse."

If a third of developers would rather, in essence, throw aay their code than have to work with the upstream kernel developers, things are broken.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:04 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

We might suppose that the Microsoft corporation, which won't even let you commit a fix that contains swear words or has anything less than complimentary to say about key partner brands, is a "friendlier" organisation to do business with in this rather limited sense.

A few seconds confirms that Microsoft's products do not have one third more upstreamed third party stuff. Quite the contrary, far more so than in Linux, everything is kept in-house and/ or thrown over the fence as unmaintainable binaries.

Laziness wins. Not every time, but overwhelmingly the true answer is "I couldn't be bothered" and what you can find out with a survey is "My currently favoured excuse for why I couldn't be bothered, PS I am goofing off to fill out this survey too".

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:17 UTC (Wed) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link] (1 responses)

I fail to see any point attempting a constructive conversation with someone whose response to evidence is to claim everyone is lying.

So, have fun ignoring what people are telling you and making up little fairy tales. It won't fix them problem, of course, but I guess getting to treat people like shit it more important than working code.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 19:37 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

So, Microsoft do have all this stuff? They're so friendly, surely they'd be falling over non-scared developers who, we've established have plenty of spare time and are extremely enthusiastic about handing this stuff over, they're just _terrified_ of upstreaming in Linux. No?

People lie in surveys. They lie in an anonymous psychology study. They lie in a corporate satisfaction survey. A properly conducted census actually has to be post-processed to compensate for this, or it won't reflect reality. Surveys aren't useless, but you should take them with a large dose of salt.

We have an actual data point from the real world, and it doesn't match what we might think we should learn from the survey. That doesn't automatically mean the survey is wrong, but it means we should be far more cautious than it seems you're willing to be. It isn't my goal to "treat people like shit" even the inevitable LWN guests who don't have a dime to pay for a subscription but do want to put in their tuppence about how Linux ought to be run. However I do care about working code. So show me the code.

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Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:42 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Again: data really seriously missing. Generally, jerks who insult people at whim do rather badly in society.

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Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:46 UTC (Mon) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (4 responses)

Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.

I don't buy it. Having a thick skin may help you be on the receiving end when somebody is nasty, but it has two disadvantages:

  • It generally means that you're less sensitive to subtle interactions. If your skin is thick enough to shrug off slings and arrows, it's usually incapable of sensing a gentle touch. That can mean you ignore points people are trying to make, which also hampers communications.
  • There's a natural tendency for people to assume that others have their own sensitivity, so that the people with the thickest skin are also often unsubtle in what they say. That means they're more likely to offend sensitive people without realizing it

I suspect that this combination is what has led to the unfortunate state of kernel development. When you put a bunch of people with thick skin in charge, you wind up with an environment where only people with thick skin can thrive.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:16 UTC (Mon) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (3 responses)

>> Having a thick skin makes you better able to deal with pretty much every human interaction, not just kernel hacking.
> I don't buy it. Having a thick skin may help you be on the receiving end when somebody is nasty, but it has two disadvantages:

No, there's no question about that --- having a thick skin helps you when you're on the receiving end of any sort of adversity. That doesn't give you license to be an asshole, nor does it mean you should necessarily put up with said adversity.

But back to the subject at hand. Given a choice, I'll choose to work with thicker-skinned folks; not because it means I get to be a total clod, but because it results in a far, far more productive team. In my experience, etc etc etc.

Yes, there are situations where a thick skin may put you at a disadvantage. So it's a good thing that we have a diversity of different personality types, eh?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:45 UTC (Tue) by niner (guest, #26151) [Link] (2 responses)

Here you claim that working with thicker-skinned folkes gives you a far, far more productive team, while just a couple postings above you are looking forward to leaving the industry, because of the hostile environments, you yourself choose to be in.

Doesn't this contradiction strike you as glaringly obvious? Have you considered, that maybe working with more sensitive people would create less hostile environments, that you and others could actually enjoy working in?

From personal experience, I can tell you, that software development can be a field that's fun and rewarding. And yes, that's true even if done as a profession in a corporate environment. It is quite possible to keep very high quality standards in code reviews without ever attacking the person and quite contrary, while being appreciative of a person's efforts. All it takes really is good examples. We don't have to teach newcomers on the team how to do that. They just pick it up.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:58 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

> Doesn't this contradiction strike you as glaringly obvious? Have you considered, that maybe working with more sensitive people would create less hostile environments, that you and others could actually enjoy working in?

Not at all, because having thick skin does not mean that you're an asshole or somehow difficult to work with.

It's no different than the truism for network programming -- be as liberal as possible in what you accept, but be as conservative as possible in what you put out.

> From personal experience, I can tell you, that software development can be a field that's fun and rewarding.

My experience agrees that it *can be* fun and rewarding. But poor management will ruin anything.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 7:46 UTC (Wed) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> It's no different than the truism for network programming -- be as liberal as possible in what you accept, but be as conservative as possible in what you put out.

Which is kind of bad analogy because this truism for network programming proved itself to be a recipe for a network made of crappy devices where problems are never fixed. Or maybe it's actually really good analogy... If you're liberal in accepting crap from others, they will never improve and the environment will remain toxic. So yes, I agree with you, but that not in the way you anticipated :)

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Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:09 UTC (Mon) by roc (subscriber, #30627) [Link]

Many long-time Mozilla developers have developed thick skins due to years of weathering attacks from jerks (from "give up, IE6 has won, ha ha ha" until now). I don't think this is a good thing; it makes it harder to accept valid criticism.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:38 UTC (Tue) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

I would instead says it makes you better at _not_ dealing with human interaction.

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Posted Oct 6, 2015 14:58 UTC (Tue) by dunlapg (guest, #57764) [Link] (1 responses)

Google "Assholes are killing your project". There are dozens of versions of this talk, but the one that I saw had a couple of graphs. The one that stayed with me was a graph of rate of contributions to glibc over time. It had to big "jumps". The first was when they switched to git; the second was when Ulrich Drepper stepped down as project lead. Drepper was technically very good; but there is no way that he as a single individual could make up for the development output of all the people that he drove away.

Also read "The No-Asshole Rule", by Robert I. Sutton -- that's more general, but has lots of evidence as well.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:44 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Look at gentoo ... I don't really follow the development of the distro, despite using it, but I get the impression it's in a slow downward spiral ...

Because a couple of jerks drove away maybe half the developers, and when those that were left finally kicked the jerks out, the damage was almost irreversible ...

I *hope* things are looking up, I'm not sure. I don't want to have to find another distro :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 22:02 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (4 responses)

The extraordinary hypothesis demanding proof here is surely that having extra-thick skin or being pointlessly offensive makes you a better kernel hacker than anyone without those attributes (or even than most people without them).
Well, if you take extra-thick skin and being pointlessly offensive to its ultimate conclusion, you'll have just Linus Torvalds and Lennart Poettering remaining on LKML.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:13 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't think you'll still have Lennart ...

From what I know he's a nice person. He's had to *become* thick-skinned because of all the jerks around him, but he'd much rather ditch that and be a generally nice guy.

The problem is he doesn't suffer fools gladly - if his program breaks because your program doesn't honour the contract that *IT* offered him, well of course he's going to be upset about it!

Oh - and can I give another example of a community that seems to manage to be very civil and works well - LibreOffice. No small thanks to Michael Meeks for that. He gets the best out of people, not the worst - oh and I think he's a brit by the way :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 13:33 UTC (Fri) by jezuch (subscriber, #52988) [Link]

> I don't think you'll still have Lennart ...

Well, I've seen many of his comments here and I don't think I've ever seen him being disrespectful (even though most of the time he has to debunk myths and misconceptions about his work). I suspect that the perception that Lennart is "difficult" comes from the fact that people do not like to have their beliefs shattered (corrected) so thoroughly :)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 12:32 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link]

>From what I know he's a nice person.

That's because he's had all of his unflattering oral history purged from the Internet. For an example of how this fails, see his comments on the "kdbuswreck" article on LWN. Available on Google to those willing to search, of course.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 10, 2015 10:55 UTC (Sat) by ms_43 (subscriber, #99293) [Link]

How did you get that idea? There is a substantial disagreement about this between the two individuals you mention. Did you see this post, which is very much on-topic here?

https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/p...

"But no, it's not an efficient way to run a community. If Linux had success, then that certainly happened despite, not because of this behaviour. I am pretty sure the damage being done by this is quite obvious, it not only sours the tone in the Linux community, it is also teaches new contributors to adopt the same style, but that only if it doesn't scare them away in the first place. In other words: A fish rots from the head down."

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:12 UTC (Mon) by rodgerd (guest, #58896) [Link]

Do you have any evidence yours is? When I look at btrfs compared to zfs or hammer, for example, I see no particular evidence of technical superiority produced by the current Linux development model.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 21:19 UTC (Mon) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (22 responses)

Did you completely ignore the summary, let alone the actual article? The kernel just lost a technically respected contributor, because people would rather be jerks than accommodate a contributor's desire to work in an environment that focuses on technical issues rather than hyperbolic and hostile commentary. It's really really hard to be offensive if you just simply discuss technically issues in rational, analytical manner. And your proof for your side is?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 5, 2015 22:43 UTC (Mon) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (21 responses)

One specific contributor, who obviously did not agree with most other developers.

However, if the LKML is such an issue, why wasn't it bypassed? Surely it's possible to review by proxy. If there is a large group of people that can't stand the LKML, but have useful contributions, surely they should be able to contribute through some sort of proxy.

And if there is indeed such a large group, LKML posters will have to consider it. Right now there's no such a group.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 1:08 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (13 responses)

Actually, they don't have to consider it, and you have no proof it doesn't exist. I have at least two : Sarah and Con Kolivias. Again, we have data on one side, and nothing on the other.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:45 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (11 responses)

Add mjg59 to the list. (Also a good example for the person elsewhere in the thread who wanted an example of homophobia and/or sexism.)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 3:55 UTC (Tue) by ssmith32 (subscriber, #72404) [Link] (2 responses)

Oh, and Alan Cox, after he bravely delved into the tty code to clean up that hairball, and just ended up on the receiving end of one of Linus' rants. That was a pretty significant loss. Not just a contributor, but a maintainer, with a significant amount of kernel info tied up in his head, just cause Linus couldn't state objections clearly and concisely without going on some random diatribe. We're up to four people, and the population size of significant kernel contributor's isn't that big. Reaching statistical significance..

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:45 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link] (1 responses)

And Andre Hedrick, who suicided

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 5:57 UTC (Tue) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

And Richard Gooch, who became one of the many contributers who go to Google never to contribute again.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:32 UTC (Tue) by hitmark (guest, #34609) [Link] (5 responses)

Homophobia?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:10 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (4 responses)

I presume this means the "Guys, this is not a dick-sucking contest" remark, implying that dick-sucking might be something unsavory for guys. If he had said that to a woman, it's pretty obvious how she could consider this as a personal insult putting her into a sexual context based on her gender. It's not that much different with gays I guess because its use of a discriminating insult puts talker and listener on unequal footing. Like with "nigger", "but they talk like that to each other" does not really count since then it is done among equals.

At any rate, like "dick size contest", it identifies masculinity with power. Personally I consider this more gynophobic than homophobic.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 6:41 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (3 responses)

" Like with "nigger", "but they talk like that to each other" does not really count since then it is done among equals."

whoa!!! do you read yourself ? 'among equal' ? when exactly are 'they' not "among equals" ????


Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:21 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

What he's saying, is that it is normal - AND NOT ABUSIVE - for a group of people to use those terms about themselves. So if a group of black people people talk about themselves, then they can use those words freely, but outsiders can't.

Personally, I think a lot of this is the ****** politically correct brigade, objecting on other peoples' behalf when those people couldn't actually give a damn, but too many people seem incapable of obeying the golden rule - "don't be gratuitously offensive". And its corollary - "don't take offense when none was intended". As I said - I couldn't discuss race on Groklaw because too many important people took offense at my only means of expression ... :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 19:46 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link]

"What he's saying, ..."
I know, but that is _not_ what was actually said. What was said is that some people are deemed to be among "equal" when they are in company of other people that share one or more superficial visible criteria, and therefore are _not_ among 'equal' with the rest of the population.

I live in the US, I'm well aware of the knee-jerk irrational reaction to some 'magic' words, and the laughable double standard that come with it. Very typical of the local culture to think that two wrongs make a right....

All that by peoples that advocate -- apparently for others, not them -- ultra-sensitivity to what other _might_ fell about what one write/say.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 9, 2015 10:47 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

So, on black people using that word between themselves as "equals", note that are some (influential) people in that community arguing that that is not the case and that they should not do so. The rapper/poet/social-commentator Akala makes a lot of interesting points on this in various interviews. E.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FlBartyyyfk

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:14 UTC (Sun) by ksandstr (guest, #60862) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoa there pardner.

Matthew Garrett is the guy who libelled Ted Ts'o as a "rape apologist" on his blog (as Valerie Aurora[-1] had immediately before on hers), calling explicitly for social ostracism (shunning) on him, all because of a years-old[0] mailing-list post questioning a long-debunked statistic of radical feminists used to push convention codes-of-conduct. And if that's not enough, consider the magic number policing[1], hen-pecked advocacy of "deferring to [whomever] on social issues"[2], and his belligerence at various public codes-of-conduct being modified to not include the anti-white, anti-male presuppositions. He's hardly any model of civility at all.

For technological arguments, there was that time when Garrett's vision of Secure Boot in Linux required the removal of kexec and every other feature he thought could be used to subvert Secure Boot. Pressed for argument (on the LKML, no less), he doubled down on fear: Microsoft will surely deny Linux the ability to boot on Future Computers, unless the prophet is obeyed. Had he got what he wanted, it would've placed a security-related (wholly intransparent, yet overridingly important) power of veto over all kernel architecture in his hands. Suffice it to say, the attempt was rejected -- and the follow-up, which proposed to put key signing middleware into the kernel (for unexplained but vaguely related reasons), got the short fuse. A skilled developer is able to describe and justify such submissions, whereas any well-meaning fool can claim that It Must Be So Because Security while being entirely wrong.

And check it out: Microsoft hasn't spanked all of Linux with their Secure Boot hegemony. Who'd've thunk.

But, yes, let's think that he'd finally got so sick of the awful, awful LKML culture that he chucked his toys out of the pram & went to play with the cool kids instead. It's what he says himself, isn't it. Just like Sarah Sharp, ex-kernel developer since over a year ago, cares very little for the kernel besides making grandiose demands of the ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic composition of the Linux maintainership, after her re-heated ragequit.

If there's a communication problem on the LKML, then it is something very different from what the Aurora/Garrett/Sharp triple would have you think. Those three, and their useful idiots, bring with them their very own suite of politicking, backstabbing, and behind-the-scenes abuse.

[-1] suggesting an unilaterally bitter rivarly in the filesystem space
[0] which must've taken some digging indeed
[1] no boobies in the kernel! think of the children!
[2] because of course everyone's a bleeding Rainman, desperately in need of chaperoning so as to not frighten the Women & Horses

Enough

Posted Oct 18, 2015 13:52 UTC (Sun) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

I suspect you have just single-handedly convinced a lot of people that folks like Matthew have a point. You need to stop doing that here.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:26 UTC (Wed) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link]

Thankfully CK only left the mailing lists -- not kernel hacking entirely.

BFS is a godsend for those of us who don't have a 16-core Xeon in our netbook or phone and want to actually use it. And it'll *never* be in mainline because the maintainers are so arrogant.

Same caveat applies for the (unrelated) BFQ: the maintainer's demand there was along the lines of "submit this as a broken up series of patches that mutates CFQ into BFQ one step at a time or we won't consider it at all". That's like asking for btrfs as a series of diffs against xfs.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 2:41 UTC (Tue) by fuhchee (guest, #40059) [Link] (6 responses)

Now there's an idea! Someone like the Linux Foundation could assemble a bank of humans (or software?) to could act as discreet proxy email filterer-forwarders between rude communicators on LKML or whereever and nice communicators. As long as most traffic can go through email, and latency is reasonable, it might work.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 7:45 UTC (Tue) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (5 responses)

But aren't there such examples already?

A reply to the original post mentioned Linaro. What about various subsystem mailing lists and trees? Do all of them follow the main LKML standard here? From previous discussions I vaguely recall that no. So do such "different" subsystems have better development performance? Easier to attract new developers? Easier to keep developers?

And no, the fact that certain 4 people left citing this issue is can hardly be considered a trend - it's still closer to an anecdote. They may have had various other reasons to leave. They might have left even if the LKML was managed differently. Or maybe (pure speculation, just to be the devil's advocate. Because I have no data) applying such a code of conduct may have prolonged useless arguments in the list and thus eventually caused various people to give up as they can't get over the "red tape" needed to contribute

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 12:43 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

> applying such a code of conduct may have prolonged useless arguments in the list and thus eventually caused various people to give up as they can't get over the "red tape" needed to contribute.

FWIW, this has happened to me a few times, in both F/OSS circles and professional employment -- Where the "process" (official or unofficial) ends up overshadowing the software itself.

I find it incredibly demoralizing, and, at least for me, is the best way to ensure I will find something else to do with my time.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:41 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (3 responses)

"They may have had various other reasons to leave."

Except, you know, several of them had *explicitly said* that's why they stopped contributing to the kernel.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 5:51 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (2 responses)

People may be upset for various reasons and I don't fully trust their subjective report on that. However, that's not my main point.

The kernel development is alive and well. People occasionally come and go. Thus the fact that certain people left due to some reason is not meaningful enough. We all know that if it ainn't broken you should not fix it. I was hoping for someone to reply with an example of a subsystem mailing list that behaves differently, to allow comparing. However, no one gave that reply so we're left with baseless arguments.

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:23 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> I was hoping for someone to reply with an example of a subsystem mailing list that behaves differently, to allow comparing.

I'm on the linux raid mailing list. I've yet to see Neil Brown foulmouthing anyone ... it's a very well-behaved list ...

Cheers,
Wol

"reviewing by proxy"

Posted Oct 7, 2015 14:34 UTC (Wed) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

>We all know that if it ainn't broken you should not fix it

Losing strong developers for bad reasons is pretty broken.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 9:09 UTC (Tue) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link] (6 responses)

And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

This kind of "cooperation" will not be much useful if it only works in these ideal environments where everyone *must* take a satisfying part of the benefits. Such perfectly rewarding situations are not so common and many things in the world necessitate a lot more gratuitous actions (e.g. justice, healthcare).
So, with your basic criteria, you will definitely end up abusing others help to your own benefit (without recognizing it due to your personal perception of the cooperation terms).
Maybe women are be more sensitive to these kind of false promises. That could explain why there are so few in some communities. Maybe these are the communities that do not share correctly the rewards of actual work?

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 13:14 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (5 responses)

>And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

"mutually beneficial arrangements" are the basis of all human interactions.

Seriously, why would I spend some of my free time writing copyleft software if I didn't derive some sort of benefit from it? Even if I only gain a sense of self-satisfaction, it's still a benefit.

Personally, I'm aligned with Donald Becker's attitude -- when asked why he "gave away" many ethernet drivers "for free", his response was along the lines of "I wrote a bunch of drivers, but got an entire operating system in return. I came out ahead." (If someone can come up with the exact quote, I'd appreciate it..)

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 6, 2015 20:55 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

> > And I suppose I cannot cooperate with you if I do not agree on these "mandatory mutual benefits" terms?

> "mutually beneficial arrangements" are the basis of all human interactions.

The problem I think the OP has (and I do too) is these "mandatory mutual benefits". What if, TO ME, they are an ANTI-benefit. That's why I have a IB problem with that word "mandatory".

Classic example - I have just been enrolled in one of the new "mandatory workplace pension"s dreamed up by our government. Where I pay in 2% of my income, and my company has to pay in another 1%. And where it's probably extremely easy for the pension provider to cream off several hundred percent of the interest in charges, transaction fees, rigged deals, etc etc. Where's the "mutual benefit" for me in contributing? I'd probably do a much better job if I was allowed to invest in my own scheme. Except there are cozy backhanders between the politicians and bankers so my savings can be ravaged by the bankers for use as political contributions ...

I find far too often that when marketers tout the "benefits" of their latest products, my reaction is "but they'll leave ME worse off!"

Cheers,
Wol

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 6, 2015 23:38 UTC (Tue) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link] (2 responses)

The scheme isn't mandatory, it's just set up as "opt out" rather than "opt in". If you're the sort of person who actually makes a choice, nothing has changed. If you're the sort of person who just lets things happen to them, vaguely meaning to do something about it "later" and that later never comes, now you get a workplace pension whereas before when you retired you'd have nothing.

The pension provider is regulated, so no, it's not "extremely easy" for them to "cream off several hundred percent of the interest" as their regulator would fine them far more than they could expect to make with such shenanigans. Most of these products are passively managed long term market investments, a mixture of government bonds, shareholdings and that sort of thing. For the passive management service the provider expects typically 0.5% (some older schemes will be 1%) of the total value annually. It would be quite striking if you managed to consistently (remember you need to keep this up for as much as 40 years) beat these numbers with your own "scheme" by enough to make up for losing the 50% boost from your employer for choosing an authorised scheme, but you are quite welcome to try.

The pension provider's product will typically also feature a lifestyle "curve" where as you approach retirement they gradually move funds from the passively managed medium risk investments to a very low risk investment with lower expected income. This reduces the risk that a market "crash" will suddenly wipe out your pension a few years before you retire with no chance to recoup the loss. Managing this yourself requires more discipline than most people can bring to bear. After all, many people doubtless thought in the weeks before the dotcom crash, these stocks just keep climbing, it would be foolish to get out now, wouldn't it ?

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 7, 2015 13:39 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

I really don't trust them - there's far too much evidence of frauds and fraudsters are far too inventive. All you need is a bonus scheme that's based on results, and someone will find some way of rigging it. As for the provider being fined, well that just makes matters worse - your manager has rigged the system, pocketed his bonuses, and left. Then the provider gets fined and, well, where's he going to get the money to pay the fine from? Chances are it WILL end up coming out of *your* pocket. Just look at all the money the mutual insurers paid out to policy holders in the wake of the endowment crash? Where did that money come from? The only place it *could* come from - the policyholders' deferred bonuses!

Problem is, you really need to start with a decent amount of money, because charges really do eat into your returns, but IFF you're prepared to put in a little bit of effort (and it really is only a little) you can make a lot of money fairly easily. Just remember Warren Buffet - "investing is a long term commitment" - day-trading will burn your profits in charges very easily. And only invest in *value* that you *understand*.

I'd look for shares at about the 40, or 110, 260 position in the FTSE that looked undervalued, buy them, and then sell them when they go above the 30, 100, or 250 position for a very nice profit.

Oh - and as for the dot-com crash? Apart from the bubble stocks (which you should have been riding as a gamble, not an investment), pretty much ALL the NYSE or FTSE stocks bounced back and in only a couple of months were higher than before the crash. The typical buy-and-hold investor didn't even make a year-on-year loss! It's only the day traders and johnny-come-latelies piling into stocks they didn't understand that got burned - oh, AND the trackers, who were heavily invested in bubble stocks because they dominated the indices ...

Cheers,
Wol

workplace pension scheme

Posted Oct 7, 2015 20:12 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

Well you seem to have some idea of how you'd do it, knock yourself out. As I said, the system isn't mandatory (for you, it's mandatory for your employer to offer it) so you can opt out and do things your way, go buy those arbitrary shares picked from FTSE and spend your evenings scouring the listings for changes, you can probably even write a bit of Perl to make the buy/ sell decisions and just perform the execution manually.

Sharp: Closing a door

Posted Oct 8, 2015 8:53 UTC (Thu) by ortalo (guest, #4654) [Link]

All this assumes that you can easily be within a secure, transparent and resource-full environment where your view of cooperation is sufficient.
As soon as threats arise or resource lack for "mutual benefits" to exists for everyone, or some rumors and lies become popular, your view of cooperation can rapidly turn into unilateral coercition or abuse. (Do you think a whining child, a gun-holding policeman, a flaterring politician or a clever advertiser rely on your ideas to interact with you?)
I think that's the basic problem here. Mrs Sharp considered that she was not in a suitable environment for her to cooperate. You do not offer any solution to that. And you cannot with simple "mutual benefits" reasoning.

BTW, review your example too. The response you quote deserves more examination no? Donald would *also* have had the operating system if he had not given his drivers code. So he is also mocking his interlocutor narrow mind in my humble opinion. The key point is probably to stop thinking *only* in terms of reward/benefits. If I am right: me too. If not, too bad. :-)


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