I've always assumed that when he really goes after someone it was him blowing off steam to maintain his own mental health rather than trying to put on a show. He's been managing a pile of complexity for over two decades that would have crushed most of us long ago. If it has been even moderately for show then sure, he should work on dialing it back (just a bit... i.e. short of getting personal).
See, I felt like I was giving him more credit by saying that his rants were performative: at least that would have an ostensible purpose. If you're abusing other people to "blow off steam", that's kind of a no-brainer "you should go see someone about not having to do that anymore".
You're right about it (objectively) being a no-brainer. Unfortunately, it's often hard to see things objectively from a first-person perspective. It sounds like Linus is acknowledging there's a problem and hopefully he can work on whatever the issue is without shaving off too much of the edge that makes him so effective.
He said that he was going to get professional help. I doubt that a dose of empathy would take off his edge. I'm expecting that he'll come back a much more effective leader.
Twenty years is pleanty of time to realise the impact of behaviour. I've seen his noteable rants posted here and on Reddit for years. There no way he didn't know.
I think he has known about his behavior for a long time, and someone with influence has explained the impact.
When you are doing something no one else has done before, it can be very challenging to figure out which pieces of what you do are essential secret sauce and which could stand to be improved.
I changed my HN handle from Mz to this one after more than 8 years and only after hitting the leaderboard. I appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard. It genuinely took me that long to conclude that my handle was a real problem in part because I was so dramatically outperforming other women in terms of being accepted here that, for the longest time, it honestly wasn't clear to me that it particularly mattered.
Changing my handle was so very well received that I'm sure I did the right thing. But, no, I honestly didn't see it as a big issue until after I hit the leaderboard. A few weeks later, I changed it.
Linus is a man with no real peers and there are few people who are anything close to a peer. It is hardly surprising to me that he lacks perspective on some details. It would be quite shocking if he didn't lack perspective about some things, given the path he has walked.
I'm somewhat intrigued by your comments about a leaderboard because I'm not familiar with it. Please say more about that.
With regards to not having perspective, because he's so unique (or doing something unique), you may be right. I wonder if in fact he has been enabled for many years by his closest collaborators. People who should have said, "Hey Linus don't be a dick".
There's a debate going on in Australia, about whether it's ok to bully a bit, in parliament, because it's that sort of place. It's also a workplace and bullying is illegal in a workplace.
It's ok to be a dick if your a successful, influencial genius, not ok if your not successful, not influencial or not a genius. Maybe. He's a member of a broader community, where norms exist, and courtesy costs very little.
> When you are doing something no one else has done before
Leading people?
Fair enough, he ceated something remarkable, but at the end of the day people have been leading others for literally millennia. So I'm not willing to cut him slack on that account.
(Having said that, I'm deeply impressed by the step he took in that email, and did it publicly)
What he is doing is fundamentally unlike being a CEO of a traditional corporation, being the founder of a standard charity or similar. Because it is an open source project, a great deal of what he says is available for public consumption.
When most CEOs have a cow, a few people witness it and then they sanitize the message before releasing a PR statement of what the CEO would like to see happen. When Linus has a cow, it can end up on the front page of Hacker News with everyone talking trash about him.
As far as I know, he actually handles that piece of it remarkably well. Most people would not cope too well with such a situation. I have never heard of him then going on a screed about "assholes on Hacker News" or whatever. Instead, what I have seen is "polite" and "well behaved" people nastily referring to it as "the peanut gallery," which is incredibly insulting and dismissive. I have yet to personally see Linus do such a thing.
Given how much people here like to talk trash about him, I infer this suggests it is something he doesn't do.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. You have very good points.
It wouldn't be in my personality (I think) to lash out at people publicly like that, precisely because it's a public channel. It is in his personality, however, and I think it's fair to observe the negative aspects of this behaviour, and call him out on it.
And I particularly dislike the "if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen" apologist crowd (which you are not part of, I know). Not sure if I'm blowing this out of proportion, but to my ears it sounds not very different from "if you don't want to be sexually assaulted, you shouldn't have dressed like that".
Having said all that: I'm actually really impressed by Linus' email. Proud of him, even. Like all of us he has his vices, but he has become aware of them and tries to improve. What more can you ask.
To me, this has pretty much taken all of the negativity out of future blowups he might (will, probably) have: because he's now on record for not intending to be this way, I personally could overlook any personal attacks and filter them as unintentional, reacting only to the factual content.
Let me just discuss the argument about being this way in public vs. in private. IMO even traditional CEOs shouldn't be that way, whether it becomes public or not. For one thing because it's "not nice" (which they might not care about), but for another because it might foster a climate that is detrimental to the company.
A good example might be VW, whose exhaust cheating fiasco seems to have come about in part because engineers didn't dare push back against impossible demands from top management.
It wouldn't be in my personality (I think) to lash out at people publicly like that, precisely because it's a public channel.
When you live in a fish bowl, it gets much harder to figure out where to draw that line. Big celebrities can't take a piss so to speak without the rumor mill going crazy. They do not have the kind of privacy ordinary people take for granted. If they eat dinner with someone, all the gossip rags explode with speculation that there is a business deal in the making or this is their new love interest.
If everyone talks smack about you for taking a piss, "just hold it" isn't actually a solution. You will eventually explode.
I suggested elsewhere in this discussion that he would probably benefit from a creative outlet. I'm very sincere about that and I have good reason to think it would actually help him.
But, hey, my name is mud and I'm a big fat nobody. So I won't be wasting my time or his by trying to track down his email address and shoot him an email.
There are a lot of ways to blow off steam. If the way one picks is performative public abuse, then it's not just about relaxation. One can maintain one's own mental health without damaging that of others.
