Video Harnessing Conflict in the Workplace (video) 93
Nigel likes Linus (as do most people who've met him in person) and points out that Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius. The same could be said about the late Steve Jobs and a number of other interesting leaders in the computer business. And Nigel's book and this interview also talk about something that may be more important in the long run than this year's small spate of Linux publicity, namely mentoring and how it can help millennials become productive workers in knowledge fields -- which a whole bunch of them need to start doing PDQ because all the baby boomers everybody loves to hate are either retired already or will be retired before long.
Nigel: When you rub two objects together, you get friction, friction produces heat, that produces light and light makes us think more broadly.
Slashdot: Okay, so Linus Torvalds routinely gets called out for running the Linux development effort with too much conflict and that he has no problem fighting to head off. What do you think? Is that possibly some of the reason for Linux’s development success?
Nigel: Well, it could be. And he is a very unique character. And so when you get somebody like him or a Zuckerberg or somebody who leads an organization with such charisma they are going to get away with a lot more than everybody else. So they can do some of that stuff because of who they are and what their history is. For most of us, we are not going to get away with that sort of behavior. So we can create some conflict, but we have to be careful how we do that. Because it is very easy for people to take that personally.
Slashdot: So you might be saying “You are not Steve Jobs.”
Nigel: Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. I mean Steve was well known for going into a room and complaining about the shape of the letter p or the particular color in the Google sign. And that works for him, but it is probably not going to work for most of us in our work environments.
Slashdot: Okay, so how do we set up meaningful and useful conflict? What do we do? Or should we try?
Nigel: So I think we should try. And I think the answer is what we have to do is look for places where there is disagreement, I mean forcing disagreement I think is a pretty negative thing to do.
Slashdot: Right.
Nigel: There’s normally some disagreement in work and there are people with different opinions, you’ve got to give them the chance to air those opinions and discuss, but you got to do it with some very basic rules. And I think one of the most important rules is: You can’t make this or take this personal. You have to keep it focused on the business objectives. And the other most important rule is: You got to do it with transparency. So where this goes wrong is when people go to their sides, go to other side of the room and start whispering about each other. Conflict at work is okay when there is transparency in the process and there is transparency in the decision making process at the end of it.
Slashdot: Transparency—how do we define that in this context?
Nigel: So I tell people that to really work effectively in this modern world they have to really run with three things: Honesty, integrity and transparency. And so here, we are talking about the transparency of decision making. So let’s say you and I are arguing about a particular program or process we are in, and we bring in a third party who may be our boss or some other person to help resolve this. Transparency means when they make a decision, or when a decision is made, you and I need to be as involved in that decision making process or at least see it go on, as we were in the debate. Because if we are not, we lose. We are just going to go lick our wounds in the corner. So transparency means make the decision making process visible, make what you are doing visible so everybody can see how the final result came to.
Slashdot: Now you wrote a book, what is that titledin the 21st century.
Nigel: Yes. It is called Become a 21st Century Executive. And I think if we were retitling it, we might have just called it Become a 21st Century Leader. But it really plays to the fact that what it takes to succeed in this century may be different from what it took to succeed in the last century.
Slashdot: Well, so for instance, you and I are using Skype at the moment to have a face to face interview without the annoyances of airports, airplanes and the expensive tickets and hotels. In the last century, we didn’t do this, did we?
Nigel: No we didn’t. We either did a phone conversation and you sat in front of your golf ball typewriter banging on the keys. Or one of us spent a large amount of money or both of us did. And I think what you are showing is one of the three big differences in this generation in technology and how the technology is used. It is probably the biggest of the three.
Slashdot: Yeah.
Nigel: You want to know the other two? The other two are the millennials. So the millennial generation by 2020 will be half the workforce, and they are coming with a very different set of desires and needs and interests. And they are changing our workplace. And I think the last one is globalization. We see everything, now some of that is caused by technology but we are in a world where stuff means really quickly and what matters to us matters to someone at the other side of the world. And if you bring those three things together you can’t just work in the bubble, but maybe in the ‘70s or ‘80s those of us who worked in those years did.
Slashdot: Yeah. No, not only are you right but I read Thomas Friedman’s book The World Is Flat number on, the web is worldwide, the world is flat and I can talk to Cliff Miller (who is not a relative of mine) in Beijing just the same way, you know, we have got earth covered.
Nigel: Yeah, I was stuck in Dallas Fort Worth airport a few years ago.
Slashdot: Oh my God. Yes.
Nigel: And I am sure you know that experience. And in the thunderstorm, I went into the bookshop and I was just looking though the management books, and it struck me they were all written by people who were leaders in the ‘70s and ‘80s of the last century. And nothing about their world and our world looks similar. And the next generation of leaders, and look—half the workforce is going to be millennials by 2020.
Slashdot: Yes.
Nigel: Then you and I are going to rely on them to not screw up everything we need.
Slashdot: And the paychecks and social security will come in.
Nigel: In particular. We need to make sure they are getting the same skills and support and help that we might have got twenty or thirty years ago, but companies don’t do it today. And so we build a website and a set of tools really to try and help mentor that generation.
Slashdot: Yes, and we do do it, don’t we? I do.
Nigel: I think we do actually. I think naturally good people mentor. Because we are keen to share our experience. I would say, by the way, it is important to understand the difference between coaching and mentoring. Because coaching is people running up and down the sidelines shouting instructions, mentoring is about helping people train the next generation to think for themselves. So millennials don’t necessarily want to be told what to do by us. But we can mentor to help them be more effective of what they are doing, and I think that’s a role we’ve all got to do.
Slashdot: Alright, so we do that. This is to make a world a better place. Do we have less conflict?
Nigel: I think we don’t have less conflict but I don’t have a problem with conflict I have a problem with warfare. And so I would encourage companies and encourage organizations to be transparent to get the conflict out to have a conversation. And now by the way, that requires compromise okay.
Slashdot: Compromise yes.
Nigel: And compromise is a good thing, but it doesn’t necessarily mean I believe in consensus because consensus may be either impossible to achieve or take so long that you miss the opportunity.
Slashdot: And yet for years I remember that Japanese companies are held up as examples because they operated on consensus management. Is that dead?
Nigel: So I actually one of my first customers as a systems engineer years ago was a Japanese car manufacturing company and they would operate on the consensus. So when you try to sell them something it could take a year for everybody to come to agreement. But actually the world and business moves a bit faster than that now. And I think you are not going to have the same time you had in the ‘80s to achieve consensus, nor by the way, will you ever, I think successfully do it. The last thing you want to do is have people become passive aggressive because they didn’t get included. So while you do want to compromise, consensus may be culturally a really hard thing to achieve.
Slashdot: Okay, now, I know a lot of people who worked at Sun. Now you worked there too. How didI have always tried to figure out how Sun’s management worked—conflict, consensus, compromise--or did it?
Nigel: So I joined Sun Microsystems, we were acquired, I was with a company called Storage Tek which you may remember - they were tape libraries and we were acquired, and so we got acquired in, and I found it a really interesting environment. And I had really come from East Coast world of IBM where, and some people used to joke, we used to say IBM takes nine months to make a decision, and I would say, yeah, but at Sun we take nine seconds to make a decision and then we argue about it for nine months. So the elapsed time can really be the same, but I think Sun had that very west coast San Francisco move fast more sort of aim-fire, aim-fire, aim-fire, where I had really come from the East Coast which is a bit more aim, ready, aim aim aim fire. And so they moved and they made mistakes but they also succeeded a lot. And I think Scott and then Jonathan really led a culture that wanted to think through and occasionally use conflict but just get things done.
Slashdot: So your book, which we have linked to in the text—will it help them, ‘them’ being the great washed, I didn’t say unwashed, I said the great washed?
Nigel: So the subtitle of the book’s called Become a 21st Century Executive, but the subtitle is Break Away From the Pack. And I think the book was really written for people to stop muddling through, it is an old English expression, ‘to muddle through’.
Slashdot: Yes.
Nigel: So many of us muddle through our careers. And the idea is that there is a bunch of 36 very simple lessons in the book that if you follow you won’t muddle through your career, you will accelerate, so it will help you hopefully break away from the pack of people muddling through.
Slashdot: Okay, now I would say most of people who are watching this, or reading the transcript are programmers, are coders or they are IT people probably not management, how does this apply to them?
Nigel: So it is a good question. I would tell you that even within the coder community there are leaders. And there are supervisors, and there are all the way up to CTOs, and into your career, you want to be in your little cubicle, and your own office and do 10,000 lines of code a year and be happy with yourself, then maybe you shouldn’t buy this book, but if at some point you want to be more than that, you do want to be a leader, to be an architect, to really drive a team, then there are lots of lessons in this for you, that by the way, maybe there are soft skills that sometimes programmers look down on, but might actually be required to achieve some success.
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Oh you millenials... Conflict does not have to be brutality, nobody is advocating you work for someone who pours human feces on you every morning.
The fact is you are in competition. By all means generational stereotypes are somewhat bunk, but not totally and you'll be competing with baby boomers and Gen-Xers for a long time. Imagining yourself a special snowflake won't be conducive to said competition.
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No, no, conflict is always bad. The precious snowflakes are all unique, so there shouldn't be any conflict because we're all special. Of course, those of us who have grown up know that conflict exists, can't be suppressed effectively, and that "conflict" and "assholishness" are two very, very different things.
Let me guess. You're short, you're the one everybody picked on and now you're an overweight middle manager and somebody's going to be getting some payback.
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Please name a single employer that acknowledges (Score:2)
basic human dignity as per your post.
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If it were legal to buy slaves
But slaves are expensive to maintain. What the modern executive really wants is a bunch of slaves who he doesn't have to feed house or clothe.
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There is far too much hype about the entitlements of the undeserving poor, there needs to be more discussion about the presumed entitlement of the undeserving 1%. There is no economic benefit from these scroungers (See Thomas Pikettys Capital) and society needs to pull the rug out from under them. The continuous propaganda selling the disgraceful behavior of these people needs to be questioned, they are not an essential part of capitalism.
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Where do you you people work? Let me know, so I never work there. I work for a mid sized (3000 people) employee owned Engineering consulting company. We hire smart people who work hard. We design and build cool stuff (we think it's cool) and get paid well for doing it. Managers, (we don't have very many) try to treat people with respect, dignity, and tolerance, and expect the same. We still criticize and correct peoples work, we just do it without being an asshole about it. Nobody yells, nobody fights, no
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(Please name a single employer that acknowledges) basic human dignity as per your post.
Mine.
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Be careful. Your "basic human dignity" is another person's "you're being an asshole." We all have our thresholds, but I've been astounded at the sensitivity many of my co-workers for what I would consider benign things.
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If it gets too bad, the workers there can always harness the conflict all their coworkers have with management, to strike some kind of better deal.
Re: How about (Score:4, Insightful)
There is nothing inhuman about being managed by a straight talking lead who tells you exactly what you are doing wrong in blunt, uncertain terms.
What is inhuman and undignified is being managed by HR, to whom you are a number, and follow policies that dictate how your team is to communicate and what you are allowed to say.
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There is nothing inhuman about being managed by a straight talking lead who tells you exactly what you are doing wrong in blunt, uncertain terms.
What is inhuman and undignified is being managed by HR, to whom you are a number, and follow policies that dictate how your team is to communicate and what you are allowed to say.
I agree; I think the problem here, though, is that there's a difference between simply being blunt and telling it like it is and being an asshole...but that often the latter believes they are the former. Adding to that, where does one draw the line...and what if the person who is the recipient of the blunt talk is simply failing, and trying to rationalize it away by saying "oh, he's just an asshole"?
Then there's also the big question: what if the person is an asshole, but also a superstar? At what point i
Lack of management (Score:1)
And in a lot of places, there's a lack of effective management because they've essentially been neutered, and are afraid to crack down on bad employees without a lot of history and an airtight place. This leads to places that end up with periodic "purges" because - short of getting caught pissing in the coffee pot - management is afraid to deal with employees f*** ups in the short term.
Unions sometimes exaggerate the problem (they do fix other issues) because their mandate has them defending some fairly vil
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I don't know and I don't care. If I wanted to waste my time on videos, I'd watch something more interesting than a talking head.
Also "And Nigel's book (and this interview) also talk about something that may be more important in the long run than this small spate of Linux publicity". But probably not.
Or you could hire Gen X (Score:5, Insightful)
>> which a whole bunch of them need to start doing PDQ because all the baby boomers everybody loves to hate are either retired already or will be retired before long
Or...you could hire Gen X (in their 30's-50's)
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No, you don't need to do that. You can just outsource everything offshore, and let the middle class implode here. Later, when our economy resembles Somalia's, no one will care much about how productive workers in this country are.
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The Chinese middle class is quickly rising.
Nobody needs these people (Score:1, Insightful)
Nobody needs people like Nigel Dessau. What do they actually do? Nothing. They write books and run their mouth about subjects they know ZERO about. What does this guy know about actually producing something like the Linux kernel? NOTHING. The fact that Slashdot gives these idiots a place to spew their garbage is a sign of how far this site has fallen.
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Management consultants... *sigh*
I wonder how you get that gig? Seems like free money for running your mouth.
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Here's Mr. Dessau's tips for handling Millennials at the workplace:
"How do GenX and the [Baby Boomers] manage millennials effectively?" Dessau said. "If you can follow these [five tips], you'll do a good job at retaining them."
Don’t confuse what motivates you with what motivates them."If you want to hire and retain a millennial, you must be willing to learn their values," Dessau said, adding that millennials are often less interested in salary and more so in things like corporate
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I saw a talk about "what millenials want" (bizarrely, part of a series on UI design) and my thoughts were pretty much the same as yours.
I know what they need - a sound kick in the arse.
Re:If anyone ever talked to me like Linus or Jobs (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Most people feel this way too, which is why Jobs never got anyone to work for him very long and his company went under. Oh wait...
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Well Apple is designed from the ground up for followers.
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Logic failure. We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel, or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs. I certainly wouldn't bother with either of those things, when there are plenty of other much better opportunities available.
I really can't understand why someone would want to work for someone like Jobs. If you have that much talent then your skills are in demand elsewhere, and it's not like Apple pays 2x market rate (in fact weren't they part of the scam to underp
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Logic failure. We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel, or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs. I certainly wouldn't bother with either of those things, when there are plenty of other much better opportunities available.
I really can't understand why someone would want to work for someone like Jobs. If you have that much talent then your skills are in demand elsewhere, and it's not like Apple pays 2x market rate (in fact weren't they part of the scam to underpay tech workers that ended up in court recently?), so why put up with it? What makes that amount of stress and conflict worth putting up with?
While I actually agree with you that if my personal threshold is exceeded I'm willing to tell my employer to go fuck themselves, you're seem to be dismissing the fact that the most successful companies are those who you wouldn't work for.
Hell, you're saying that you don't know how many useful people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel because they won't take a public rant from Linus, but as a matter of fact we *do* know that they weren't needed to become successful. If they were needed, the kernel wou
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Wrong question. How much better would the kernel be with their contributions? Maybe Linux would have replaced Windows by now (unlikely, I know). Maybe it would have gained some really useful feature. Maybe a less hostile environment surrounding kernel development would have prevented systemd being what it is (divisive and rage inducing).
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Wrong question. How much better would the kernel be with their contributions? Maybe Linux would have replaced Windows by now (unlikely, I know). Maybe it would have gained some really useful feature. Maybe a less hostile environment surrounding kernel development would have prevented systemd being what it is (divisive and rage inducing).
You are presenting the hypothetical situations as a given. Linux, the kernel, is a runaway success. It is by far the most used kernel in the world. The most flexible. The most important. You want to believe that it would be even better had some of these hypothetical contributors materialised.
Your presentation of systemd as an example is a good one, but not for you. All the userland stuff - gnome3, systemd, wayland, etc - all those things are the product of organisations that have had a womens outreach prog
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We don't know how many people avoided contributing to the Linux kernel
No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
or went to work somewhere other than Apple to avoid Jobs
No, but we DO know that Apple has the highest market cap of all the tech companies (and all companies, IIRC), and is definitely the most profitable of all tech companies.
So obviously, these organizations' styles *are* successful for them. Maybe you don't like them, maybe
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No, but we DO know that no other FOSS project has been remotely as successful. How many devices use BSD kernels?
All the Apple ones. And Panasonic smart TVs. I'm sure there are many more. Aren't a lot of routers using BSD?
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I can't believe how many people these days think high school is a model of how life should be.
High school is what life is when people are too immature and self-absorbed to deal with reality.
FWIW if Linus or Jobs ever talked to you they'd either appreciate your attitude and speak to you with respect because of it - or, more likely, they would dissect your fragile ego, smash the chip off your shoulder and leave you to spend the next five years figuring out why you were such a waste of biological matter.
AshleyMadison.com and Washington Post (Score:2)
Versions of Linux have proved vulnerable to serious bugs in recent years. AshleyMadison.com, the Web site that facilitates extramarital affairs and suffered an embarrassing data breach in July, was reportedly running Linux on its servers, as do many companies.. Those problems did not involve the kernel itself, but experts say the kernel has become a popular target for hackers building “botnets,” giant networks of computers that can be organized to initiate cyberattacks.
People in AshleyMadison.com also were reading Washington Post .. their hack was not related to this fact but many experts say badly edited newspapers become a popular and easy target for populists.
Harnessing conflict means (Score:2)
*Divide and Conquer*
How about the conflick from trying to get a union (Score:2)
How about the conflict from trying to get a union up and running.
Linus is a genius? (Score:3)
I mean I don't doubt that he may be very smart, but is he actually a genius?
And since when does being a genius somehow give one a free pass on being "prickly"? If anything, I think any forgiveness in that area which may be offered by the public would have more to do with what a person is known for, and how much they have actually done than it would to do with the person's intelligence.
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I think the "genius" bit may be unfounded, it's hard to say for sure. What he really meant there is that Linux has a proven track record of getting stuff done, which is honestly a lot more important than an IQ score. There's a crapload of people in MENSA who just sit around in MENSA meetings talking about how smart they are, while they've never actually done anything very productive in life at all. Just look at Marilyn vos Savant: what did she ever do besides write a newspaper column (wherein she got a f
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I mean I don't doubt that he may be very smart, but is he actually a genius?
Depends how you measure. Linus is the Sherlock Holmes of bug hunting. Is Sherlock Holmes a genius? (Or is he even a he?) As far as interpersonal interaction goes, Linus is a dunce. Ask him, he won't deny it.
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Since people decided they care more about what they can get than the price other people must pay. Linus gets away with being "prickly" to other people because you want the Linux kernel and fuck them.
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My Takeaway (Score:2)
fuck so called geniuses (Score:2)
I would never want to work for them. I much prefer my current work environment where no one yells at eachother and everyone is friendly and apologizes sincerely when they screw up.
Trust me, I have worked at places where everyone yells at each other, has fights in the office (as opposed to disagreements behind closed doors) etc, and I wouldn't trade my current work environment for more money in those organizations.
A dick who is a genius is still a dick. The archetypal "house" type character. Do you want to b
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Trust me, I have worked at places where everyone yells at each other, has fights in the office (as opposed to disagreements behind closed doors) etc, and I wouldn't trade my current work environment for more money in those organizations.
I might be ok with it if it were actual fighting. There are a few people I've worked with I'd be happy to step in the ring and settle things a bit more energetically.
Slipping (Score:1, Flamebait)
What the fuck, people? We're 27 comments in to a story about "conflict in the workplace" and nobody's mentioned "SJWs" yet. Don't you have any self-respect?
Here, I'll start:
q: How many SJWs does it take to screw in a light bulb?
a: 14. One to screw it in and 13 more to tell the bulb to check its privilege.
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So, a priest, a rabbi and an SJW walk into a bar...
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What the fuck, people? We're 27 comments in to a story about "conflict in the workplace" and nobody's mentioned "SJWs" yet. Don't you have any self-respect?
Toxic workplaces aren't just a problem for females. Unfortunately, too many men are afraid to complain about toxic workplace environments because they think it will make them look less like a pussy^Wman.
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True. Unfortunately there is almost nobody to complain to, and if there is, they won't/can't do anything. From my experience HR is there to cover the companies butt from legal problems. They will tick off a list of boxes so if an issue lands before a judge the company can say they were fair and tried everything. When I refused to tolerate my managers crap the whole thing degraded into a high school popularity contest, with each of us trying to rally as many supporters as possible. Most of my colleagues woul
conflict != being a jerk (Score:2, Informative)
As others have pointed out here before, constructive conflict/disagreement in the workplace does not require acting like an asshole. If you read any of Sarah Sharp's comments on this matter, it is very clear that she had no problem at all with technical criticism or disagreement. Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks. The summary seems to just lump all of this together, suggesting that Linus telling people that they are worthless and should kill themselves is an example of prod
There's Prickly and then there's Steve Jobs (Score:1)
...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius. The same could be said about the late Steve Jobs...
You are comparing Linus to Steve Jobs? Disowning your child is not "prickly", it is a few less letters.
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As others have pointed out here before, constructive conflict/disagreement in the workplace does not require acting like an asshole. If you read any of Sarah Sharp's comments on this matter, it is very clear that she had no problem at all with technical criticism or disagreement. Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks. The summary seems to just lump all of this together, suggesting that Linus telling people that they are worthless and should kill themselves is an example of productively harnessing "conflict in the workplace".
Also, from the summary: "...Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius." Perhaps, but it could also be because he's in charge and has more power than anyone else on the project. There are plenty of really smart people who work on the Linux kernel, but most of them probably couldn't get away with the same kind of behavior because of their position in the power hierarchy. This further emphasizes why public, personal insults directed at subordinates are decidedly not an example of "harnessing workplace conflict" for productive ends.
Why is linus the leader and have the most power though? He barely commits any code to the kernel at all. I say it's time for a change in leadership.
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STFU, Lennart.
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"Linus can get away with being somewhat prickly because he's a genius." Perhaps, but it could also be because he's in charge and has more power than anyone else on the project.
And it is far from clear that he has gotten away with it. Taken some serious hits to the rep is more like it, whereas by being a bit less of a dick he'd be pure, unadulterated legend by now. No way to put that toothpaste back in the tube, but he could at least take steps to keep more of it from squeezing out.
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Her problem was with unproductive and demeaning personal attacks
None of which she experience herself, until she decided butt in to a conversation that had nothing to do with her.
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Worse, he's flat-out wrong on this issue and there's no mechanism for people who understand security better than he does to force him on it. So he does what any dictator does: he doubles down on a position that is untenable in the long run.
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A lesser member of the Bach [wikipedia.org] family of composers.
Immaturity (Score:1)
Mentoring? (Score:1)
"... -- which a whole bunch of them need to start doing PDQ because all the baby boomers everybody loves to hate are either retired already or will be retired before long."
Wow. As a tech worker who is at the tail end of the baby boomer demographic, this one hurt just a bit.
So much for the post-PC super pro-diversity in the workplace world line that the millenials and gen-x'ers like to purport whenever given the chance. IF that's really the sentiment among the younger generations in the workplace, it's no wo
Breast reconstruction surgeon long island (Score:1)