An oldie, but a goodie
this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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I think removing someone's maintainer status does communicate disappointment in their performance quite well.
And as for anger and frustration, these things really don't matter in this circumstance. Work is not therapy. If you need to vent anger and frustration, get a therapist. Employees are employed to do their job, not to be the emotional punching bag for a manager who can't control their temper.
If an employee doesn't perform to expectations repeatedly and even after you had a few constructive one-on-ones, then demote them or fire them. No need to vent your anger on them and lose your professionalism.
Tbh, the first time a boss of mine loses their temper and verbally attacks a colleague like Linus did here, they have also lost all of my respect for them. And at that moment I will start to look for another job.
I am not and was not advocating for venting - just for communicating emotion. This can be as simple as:
"Your actions have deeply frustrated me and caused great anger on top of [technical reasons]. I would ask that you be more careful in the future."
This ensures the reader not only understands they hurt Linux with their actions but also another human being. Many people will be more careful if they know they caused personal pain to an actual human being and not just to an abstract technical object such as a codebase.
I know I am going against established cultural norms in western business context - please don't disregard my proposal just because it contradicts established culture.
I do understand what you mean, and it makes much more sense than advocating for venting.
But I still feel that putting emotions into a discussion about work performance isn't the right way, especially when done in public.
In a situation like that where something caused a lot of negative emotions (that go beyond your work performance is bad), I think you should have two separate talks. One about the factual things where one is boss and the other is employee, and one about the hurt/emotions the behaviour caused and in this talk, both are just people resolving their personal problems.
Something like the issue in the OP really shouldn't cause anger on Linus' side, since it's a totally factual issue. A propper response would have been to decline/revert the change while publically saying "This change validates that rule of the project" and then privately contacting the maintainer in question and tell him, "We talked about this repeatedly, if you don't stop, we need to take consequences."
Emotions should really only enter the picture when personal offenses where comitted before or maybe if the employee did something with the intent to hurt the project/company/manager.
But if you get really angry because your employee did something wrong, then that's a problem on the side of the manager and not on the side of the employee.
That said, I think it's totally ok to tell the employee about the consequences of their actions ("We lost X amount of money" or "It took Y amount of time to correct it" or something like that).
I agree with what you said in general.
This is probably taught in manager courses in order to protect their subordinates from managerial outbursts, which is a good cause, but they're not quite right.
The Linux kernel is Torvalds life work. He literally spent most of the time he has on this planet on it, as did thousands others. Instead of watching his children grow, he made sure the planet gets a great operating system. It takes immeasurable effort to keep a vast software project in a good state - most large organisations with many times the resources fail to do so.
The maintainers behaviour represents a complete disregard for this sacrifice. They are showing through their actions that they don't care that Torvalds and many others spent the little time they have on this planet on this software project instead of more fulfilling and joyful activities. I cannot imagine many more hurtful or disrespectful insults than this. It's not far from saying their efforts are null and thus their life wasted.
I am saying all of this because I feel that you are speaking as a leader in a company, where you make sure other people's money is spent productively. This not at all the same thing as what Torvalds is doing, because it's not just a job, it is his literal life or life's work.
This doesn't excuse the behaviour, obviously - but it makes it very human. It's good that he changed. I just hope we can find a middle ground between forced business speak and emotional outbreaks.
I'm not a manager (used to be team lead, but managing is not for me), but I've worked under a few coleric managers and some that where able to communicate in a sensible way.
One of my bosses, for example (that was the job where I was team lead) had a pretty similar style of communication as Linus.
Sure, the company was his life work. But I also started there shortly after the company was founded and I too spent a lot of time and was very emotionally invested in the company and the products. And my boss was just human (and on top didn't know a lot about the subject), so he made mistakes. And his judgement was often wrong.
But he was never able to accept that he made any mistakes. He'd offload all his mistakes onto some employee, while claiming that every idea that worked out was his, and not the idea of the employee who actually had the idea and had to convince him first. And every time something went wrong, he'd slam the door of some employee open and shouted and swore at that employee.
Turns out, that's not a great way to encourage people working there. Most of the good people quit after one especially bad explosion of his.
Back to Linus: is it human to be angry that someone disagrees with you? Maybe.
Is it in any way helpful to anyone? Clearly not.
I am pretty sure that anyone who gets to be a maintainer on the Linux kernel is heavily invested and has sacrificed a lot to get there. Attacking them like Linus did, that really renders their life work worthless.
The maintainer did nothing with the purpose to harm the Linux kernel project. He just accepted a change that he thought would improve Linux. Disagreeing on a factual topic with your boss should never trigger an explosion like that.
I would disagree just because the success of the product (be it closed or open source) shouldn't be dependent on the feelings of one person. You can be frustrated and angry, but it's more useful to explain why you feel that way and what can be done to address it. Including your feelings only makes the person not want to do what specifically hurts you, not what is best for the project.
Why not both?