throAU said:
I'm not saying that I necessarily agree with the management style, but strong language is merely a tool in a person's vocabulary. Removing those words from one's vocabulary merely reduces the ability to clearly and concisely express the level of disgust with the situation.
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Why waste time skirting around the issue using PC language that could easily be mis-construed? Call a spade a spade and move on.
There is a difference between calling a spade a spade or trying to emulate Sgt. Hartman when doing so. There is a difference between being direct, clear, and being rude. Rude is not, or very seldom, needed. When you manage something like Linus, then you
have to learn some things. You have to extend your vocabulary when you are not able to tell someone something without being rude.
Not being able to tell someone that his work is not improving the system without being rude may be his fault for not getting it when being told so politely. Not even trying to do it politely, and not even trying to improve your skills if you are unable to do this without being rude - that is
your fault. And when your peers are starting to be annoyed as time goes by (as we see now with Linus), that is a sign of him not trying, or caring. Maybe he thinks, not neccesarily conciously, that he does not need to care. It's his show, so it's his way or the highway. But that could go wrong one day.
As I mentioned in some other post, a good project leader takes care of what will happen should he himself drops off. But right now, the
bus factor of Linux is pretty small. And in this case, the bus could be his own attitude. You may stop communicating with your team when you are in the Emergency Room or Intensive Care unit, but communication also stops when your peers give you the finger and stop listening.
To find the sweet spot in this communication is hard, and that spot is different for different people. For some coworkers, a silent 'Ha-hmm' and a raised eyebrow is enough to tell them they are currently doing something silly. For others, you'd need the verbal equivalent of a sledgehammer to make that clear. In a mailing list, you have to use the same tool for everyone. So you need to be aware of the fact that half the audience will either not get it or the other half will be offended. And the thing is, to find the sweet spot, you need to evaluate the feedback. People not getting it continue to bug you, people being offended often quietly leave. Feedback then comes from people which are seriously pissed off. That's whats going on there, I think. You only get back "they don't get it, they don't get it, they don't - what's this?" Congratulations, you now have lost half the audience. Those who quietly left and now those who are really fed up.
And that is one of the points which IMHO is against Linux and for *BSD (well, OpenBSD may be a bordercase). In Linux, you have more or less a 1:N communication. In *BSD, you have more of a network, a graph with high interconnection but has less fan out. This keeps communications more polite than the 1:N, it also is more fault tolerant, but it is lacking the '1' which can be a focus for fame and to admire. That's the pro for Linux and also it's bane. That is one of the reasons why I like the *BSD community better. The other development model attracts narcists, which are then more prone to the 'I know better than you' attitude. They would like to emulate the leader, be like him.
And one thing I know, I like those characters 'over there' and not 'around here'. So I have several reasons to call it a sad day when Linux starts to break apart.
Sorry for being so long winded on this, but I find it pretty interesting to muse about the impacts of social interaction mechanisms with software engineering.