It’s something I struggle with. Some bad news comes out about some public persona doing something shitty and they get cancelled. But sometimes I really struggle with giving up the things they’ve made because I like them. There are also occasions where the person has been accused of something and it doesn’t seem true to me, or I think they’re genuinely sorry and have been punished enough, and the context isn’t being considered.
What do you think? Who do you feel conflicted about enjoying?
Both of the Linuses
Sebastian and Torvalds
Sebastian because most of the shit he’s been accused of has either been fixed openly, or was proven mostly false.
Torvalds because while he can be extremely rude, he generally only does it when the person deserves to be called out. It’s not like he’s going off at random people. Society says he should use more tact, but the dude is literally responsible for creating and now maintaining arguably the most important piece of the server software stack globally. There’s also a very high chance he’s on the spectrum.
i’ve heard Torvalds be called rude but never “cancelled”.
I think there have been attempts to cancel Torvalds after he’s slapped down some idiot in a particularly harsh manner, but I don’t think they ever stick because he doesn’t go off on people unless they really try to do shit that would compromise the integrity of the kernel and didn’t take the message to fix/bail on something when it was previously provided.
How do you define “cancelled”?
As far as I can tell both Sebastian and Torvalds are just as successful (if not more) in their respective roles today as they were before any “controversies” surrounding them were made public.
Yeah people can complain Torvalds was rude all day, but fuck me if the people he yelled at couldn’t be aggressively disrespectful in bringing half-assed work to the table and doing damage or at best wasting other’s people time.
He’s the literal “You’re not wrong, you’re just an asshole”. But if he wasn’t that way, I wonder if we’d have what we have. A nicer developer wouldn’t get the same attention.
He’s self aware and for some reason that bothers me less than an asshole who denies being an asshole.
I argue about this all the time, especially if you have to work with non-coders. People who don’t code do not understand the big picture.
Steve Wozniak is brilliant, and had Steve Jobs explain the vision and sell it to non coders.
For Microsoft. That was Ballmer.
If youre a tech lead who lets a group of marketing folks try to define the course of any application, you need someone really strong at communication to fight for you. Unfortunately, Linus didnt have one and ripping people a new asshole was the next best thing.
You probably needed someone like him in a technical leadership role somewhere, the problem was that he became the face as well.
And when he acts shitty towards somebody, he does it publicly, where he himself can also receive the backlash from what he is doing.
He’s not attempting to build a reputation as being a nice guy or a thought leader or anything. He is getting shit done, and anyone that’s got a problem with it or him can either go do it better than him or stfu
At least the face isn’t steering the brain like most organizations!
From what I understand, nothing was proven false, but there were things that were not proven true, as in “we couldn’t find documented evidence that this employee was sexually harassed”, which obviously doesn’t necessarily mean that it did not happen. They just couldn’t find a paper trail of it happening, which is understandable.
On the other hand, things like all the factual inaccuracies and whatnot were absolutely undeniable.