> I'm sure I'll get downvoted though for calling Linus a baby, because somehow insulting Linus for his flaws is never ok but when Linus does it it's so cool!
I'm pretty sure people aren't up in arms about Linus being a baby, but about your refusal to call out people on "subpar performance". Replace "subpar performance" with whatever you feel is an acceptable name for executing wrongly on very bad ideas.
And I feel like you might get downvoted because if there is one thing I HATE about companies, it's that people responding like this always get rewarded.
1) fuck up beyond belief (or just be assigned to a critical project and do nothing)
2) talk about the problem with everyone, without, of course, without fixing anything
3) inflict massive costs on everyone else because of the sudden urgent necessity of fixing your problem
4) get insane rewards for this
And I for one call statements such as the one from the top post here "optimism at it's finest":
> if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.
Unfortunately, corporate America is FULL, and I mean overloaded to the brim with people who will never admit the slightest mistake, and explode at anyone implying they made a subpar decision.
This attitude to "avoid blame" then proceeds to turn disaster into outright catastrophe. Many of these people who make some level of mistakes will see that not only can they get away with it, but aggressively attacking others for their mistakes comes with great rewards.
I have personally worked with several well known people in my field, who have climbed up the ladder this way. It isn't just that they didn't contribute, but they made great mistakes, both on the technical front (taking disastrous architectural decisions and forcing them through, despite agreement that there were very wrong), and on the financial front (doing budget allocations based on what THEY KNEW was a lost cause, and refusing to admit any fault or change course).
Once it does become clear that a disastrous mistake was made and propagated, and 90% of the budget was already spent (actually more like 150% in both cases), and none of the outcomes promised will be achieved, they then help organise a "code red", a "emergency sprint", an "extra effort", ... to "fix" things. But things are never fixed. Everyone is worse off, and will be for years.
The first few times this happens, these people are then rewarded. Promoted, in both cases. And of course, we are currently in the process of repeating one of these huge mistakes. Last time I so much as asked why this decision was made the guy very enthousiastically gave an answer, and I thought we both agreed it wasn't a good answer.
An hour later my manager asks to urgently see me.
A day later my director urgently called my manager and me to see him.
A week later we went to discuss "safety" with HR. (because of the 10 people thing, I'm sure, read on)
And yet, everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows this is a bad idea. However, having 50 people work for 1.5 years on a bad idea ... well those 50 people call it "a job", and nobody's going to be risking their career on calling this guy out any further (even if I did get 10 of them to walk into that director's office telling him that I did nothing wrong and that it's a bad idea).
But no worries ... no blame. We're still executing on that idea.
Here's the thing though. People always make mistakes. It's an unavoidable fact of life. The more power you have the bigger the scale of your fuckup. The problem is the denial of a problem (which Intel did in some ways & didn't in other) & making misleading statements. Those were all decisions not made at an engineering level BTW so berating an engineer won't help.
Finally, reading that thread further, it does seem like Linus's rant was a little premature & mistaken.
David really handles it well & explains in detail in what way Linus may be misunderstanding what's going on. It's hard to know if that response mollified Linus or if he still thinks it's bunk & that thread was just taken offline so that it wouldn't have the noise of useless spectators chiming in, but it seemed like Ingo was perhaps satisfied & moved the conversation back to a way to solve the Skylake problem in a maintainable & clean way without the undesirable implementation that was originally proposed (you know, the whole point of an RFC). An RFC typically means they were looking for feedback & discussion not getting yelled at, especially for things outside their control. That being said, I certainly understand how frustrated everyone is with this given the amount of work that's been put into this by everyone.
Engineering culture is fundamentally about learning from mistakes (either as a community or individually). We can't fear them & there are limits to how much you can go to prevent making them before you just get decision paralysis. For that reason mea culpas are also unproductive. You should acknowledge your actions & your role in it - if you think you behaved incorrectly then of course apologize if you want to - but the person would made mistakes is just as much a victim of their environment as others (i.e. if I threw you into their position without the benefit of hindsight, would you do necessarily do a better job?) Yes corporate America has issues (as does every human endeavour btw) but I'm not convinced that in any way has to do anything with this discussion.
You do realize Intel has decided to NOT fix this issue, right ? Surely some yelling about this is in order. (because fixing the issue would cost them in benchmarks)
I'm pretty sure people aren't up in arms about Linus being a baby, but about your refusal to call out people on "subpar performance". Replace "subpar performance" with whatever you feel is an acceptable name for executing wrongly on very bad ideas.
And I feel like you might get downvoted because if there is one thing I HATE about companies, it's that people responding like this always get rewarded.
1) fuck up beyond belief (or just be assigned to a critical project and do nothing)
2) talk about the problem with everyone, without, of course, without fixing anything
3) inflict massive costs on everyone else because of the sudden urgent necessity of fixing your problem
4) get insane rewards for this
And I for one call statements such as the one from the top post here "optimism at it's finest":
> if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.
Unfortunately, corporate America is FULL, and I mean overloaded to the brim with people who will never admit the slightest mistake, and explode at anyone implying they made a subpar decision.
This attitude to "avoid blame" then proceeds to turn disaster into outright catastrophe. Many of these people who make some level of mistakes will see that not only can they get away with it, but aggressively attacking others for their mistakes comes with great rewards.
I have personally worked with several well known people in my field, who have climbed up the ladder this way. It isn't just that they didn't contribute, but they made great mistakes, both on the technical front (taking disastrous architectural decisions and forcing them through, despite agreement that there were very wrong), and on the financial front (doing budget allocations based on what THEY KNEW was a lost cause, and refusing to admit any fault or change course).
Once it does become clear that a disastrous mistake was made and propagated, and 90% of the budget was already spent (actually more like 150% in both cases), and none of the outcomes promised will be achieved, they then help organise a "code red", a "emergency sprint", an "extra effort", ... to "fix" things. But things are never fixed. Everyone is worse off, and will be for years.
The first few times this happens, these people are then rewarded. Promoted, in both cases. And of course, we are currently in the process of repeating one of these huge mistakes. Last time I so much as asked why this decision was made the guy very enthousiastically gave an answer, and I thought we both agreed it wasn't a good answer.
An hour later my manager asks to urgently see me.
A day later my director urgently called my manager and me to see him.
A week later we went to discuss "safety" with HR. (because of the 10 people thing, I'm sure, read on)
And yet, everybody, and I do mean everybody, knows this is a bad idea. However, having 50 people work for 1.5 years on a bad idea ... well those 50 people call it "a job", and nobody's going to be risking their career on calling this guy out any further (even if I did get 10 of them to walk into that director's office telling him that I did nothing wrong and that it's a bad idea).
But no worries ... no blame. We're still executing on that idea.