Linus Torvalds: 'I'm Not a Programmer Anymore' (zdnet.com) 65
An anonymous reader quotes ZDNet:
Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, doesn't make speeches anymore. But, what he does do, and he did again at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon France is have public conversations with his friend Dirk Hohndel, VMware's Chief Open Source Officer. In this keynote discussion, Torvalds revealed that he doesn't think he's a programmer anymore.
So what does the person everyone thinks of as a programmer's programmer do instead? Torvalds explained:
"I don't know coding at all anymore. Most of the code I write is in my e-mails. So somebody sends me a patch ... I [reply with] pseudo code. I'm so used to editing patches now I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever tested it. I literally wrote it in the mail and say, 'I think this is how it should be done,' but this is what I do, I am not a programmer."
So, Hohndel asked, "What is your job?" Torvalds replied, "I read and write a lot of email. My job really is, in the end, is to say 'no.' Somebody has to say 'no' to [this patch or that pull request]. And because developers know that if they do something that I'll say 'no' to, they do a better job of writing the code."
So what does the person everyone thinks of as a programmer's programmer do instead? Torvalds explained:
"I don't know coding at all anymore. Most of the code I write is in my e-mails. So somebody sends me a patch ... I [reply with] pseudo code. I'm so used to editing patches now I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever tested it. I literally wrote it in the mail and say, 'I think this is how it should be done,' but this is what I do, I am not a programmer."
So, Hohndel asked, "What is your job?" Torvalds replied, "I read and write a lot of email. My job really is, in the end, is to say 'no.' Somebody has to say 'no' to [this patch or that pull request]. And because developers know that if they do something that I'll say 'no' to, they do a better job of writing the code."
Yeah, we know (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why we're stuck with your spiritual successor, Leonard Poettering.
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The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:5, Insightful)
Welcome to the all new Linux.
Gone are the days of a worldwide community of technical gurus focused like a laser on building an OS through consensus.
Now we have some incompetent clown named Pottering hijacking an entire OS thanks to be backed by a mega-corporation.
And the Linux community just stood by and let it happen.
Re:The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Systemd is not as horrible as you say. The governance of systemd and that constellation of projects (some hijacked from other developers) has more problems than Systemd itself does. If you really don't like systemd then use a distribution that does not have it, or makes it optional. There are plenty of those, including plenty of excellent quality.
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Systemd is a cancer that is destroying Linux, one distribution at a time.
I'm clinging to Slackware, praying Patrick doesn't lose motivation or give in to systemd.
Re: The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:2)
If systemd is so bad, why is it spreading to more and more distros?
Re: The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:4, Insightful)
Which is a valid question. The simple answer is it works and makes maintainer's lives easier, by making things standard and offering an easy to use API.
Treat it as an init program, sure, but it makes a whole pile of other ugly hacks and glue go away, making life simpler. There's a more standard API for user authentication. There's a more standard way of handling DNS, instead of hacked up resolve.conf files or even worse, DNS resolver daemons because DHCP complicates matters (especially if you have multiple DHCP networks that can come and go - think WiFi, WWAN (cellular), VPN and Ethernet, all of which can use DHCP, offer DHCP servers and come at go at will and thus need to be able to be added and removed from resolv.conf dynamically and out of order).
Basically, you get all that stuff "for free" going to systemd, and if you write an application environment, it means you can handle that yourself instead of forcing distro maintainers to maintain a bunch of glue scripts so they can get your stuff to work under their environment.
It's really one of the first programs that decided to standardize the whole lot - sure we had the Linux Standards Base, but no one really implemented it fully.
Then systemd came around and offered to make standard what wasn't. Sure it does it badly and a bunch of other criticisms that are probably valid, but it was the program that scratched a bunch of distro maintainer's itches in the right way so they got adopted. You're still free to not use it, but now you're forced to maintain all the glue code and scripts yourself, while other distros get to concentrate on other bits.
The good news of all this are distributions that pawn off a lot of that work to the sysadmin, like Slackware, will probably stay "traditional" since the maintainer doesn't really have to maintain the scripts - it's left as an exercise to the user, so who cares if you use sysv, upstart or systemd.
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You have confused the Linux kernel, which Linus still monitors and controls very closely no matter how much he understates his programming involvement, and the user space, which is very much not under his control.
Frankly, both are of very high quality, but the quality of the kernel is legendary.
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You have confused the Linux kernel, which Linus still monitors and controls very closely no matter how much he understates his programming involvement, and the user space, which is very much not under his control.
Frankly, both are of very high quality, but the quality of the kernel is legendary.
Who the fuck modded that down, and what is your agenda, you slimeball?
Re:The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:5, Insightful)
And the Linux community just stood by and let it happen
A lot of the Linux community aren't programmers, they really didn't have a say to begin with. The number of warm bodies working on independent FOSS projects is much smaller today. The vast majority of folks programming in the Linux "community" are doing so with a paycheck attached to it. When the warm bodies with the ability to code show up and aren't tied to a paycheck for their project, then we can all have a discussion about the matter.
The warm bodies who show up with no skill in programming bitching about what's happening in Linux are partly the problem with the "community". Code up or shut up, not liking how RedHat is running systemd? What to support an alternative like Devuan? Great! Because as it stands right now, the list of people who work on "this so important project that stands up to the tyranny of RedHat" fits on a single page and even then they're being really generous with who they are listing. If this project and ridding ourselves of systemd is so goddamn important to all that Linux stands for, why the ever loving fuck is the number of people working on it so damn small? If it's that fucking important, where are all the people?!
I hear so much about how people lament what Linux has become but I find it interesting the lack of people who show up to roll up their sleeves and are ready to help hammer out something to change the things they lament. If you aren't coding, then really why are you bitching? If you don't want to code, cool, that's fine, but fuck, don't be surprised when the people actually doing the hard part give you the middle finger when you don't like their pet project. If you aren't willing to sow a greener pasture, you're just going to have to go find one.
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Or test, or document, or support, or ... Not code (Score:3)
One can definitely contribute without writing production code. Most open source projects have many more programmers than testers, technical writers, etc. We have programmers, we need other help.
Stuff needs to be documented, hopefully well. In general programmers don't like writing user-facing documentation. If you can do that, it would really help. Testing well can take just as many person-hours as coding, ans is very important. New users ask questions on the forums or the *-users mailing lists. If you
Ps translations! (Score:2)
Btw another big one is translation. If you can translate the user-visible strings to another language, that would help.
I can *try* to add Spanish translations, but when I try to write "french fries" I end up with "fried dads", when I try to say "mom" I end up with "boob" - apparently those accent marks matter.
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When the warm bodies with the ability to code show up and aren't tied to a paycheck for their project, then we can all have a discussion about the matter. Code up or shut up
Nobody needed to code anything to solve this problem. There was nothing seriously wrong with upstart. Systemd is worse than upstart in literally all ways. The people who coded up this monstrosity are the ones who needed to shut up. Everything about it is a gargantuan waste of effort. Sometimes the answer to the problem is *not to code*.
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LOC is a terrible metric for code quality. Since RH shoved it down our throats using Money, it Must Be Good!
Re: The SystemD Fiasco - Learn To Love It! (Score:1)
no (Score:2)
He's a manager (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the (good) evolution of any technical manager - you've got too much work to delve deep into the code and its dependencies. I haven't learned much new programming languages either in the last few years, I just farm the work out to my minions, write in pseudocode and once in a while I will read the documentation of some new framework or library.
The rest of my time is spent dealing with superiors and customers, mostly managing expectations and shielding my team from the ire of some micromanager.
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He still participates actively in debugging the core kernel, if an issue rises to the point where it requires his level of skill, which is legendary. If you dougt that then google "linus bug+hunt"
Paycheck (Score:2)
Sure, there is some management but I think he's managing less and less of anything that can be tied to a schedule or budget
Have you paid attention where most of the Linux kernel (and attached tools) contributions come from nowadays ?
Surprise: the bulk of them come from developer paid by companies to do so, because the company has a strong interest in it.
Linus is quite literally managing the output (patches) programmers who are mostly paid for that by some company's budget.
e.g.: AMD is paying their own developers to write open source drivers (and corresponding Linux kernel modules among other)
e.g.: in some subsystems of the Linu
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there's managers who write pseudocode specs? what kind of alternate lala-land are you from? you mean you just don't write wishlists of things that can't be done due to data not existing to make them happen?
Doing naturally what's all too often forced (Score:1)
Some people would be at their best if they stayed technical. Others should become managers. All too often, becoming a manager is viewed as "progress" and people are made to feel like they're not doing well if they don't gradually shed their technical role and become management. This can result in frustrated people who'd rather code, lousy management, etc. We've all seen it.
Congratulations to Linus for morphing into a role that suits him, but please don't say he "progressed" into management. That's not
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It is an actual progress in this sense: no matter how good you are at your technical work, if that's the level you stay at, you are going to hit a natural limit---you are only one person and there are only 24 hours in a day. There is only so much productivity you can get out of one person, given the level of technology at the time.
At some point, in order to properly leverage your expertise and knowledge, you have to manage other people, helping them become more productive.
It doesn't mean everyone has to bec
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Linus never hit a technical limit. He has always been crap at some corners of computer science, but beyond excellent at most. Nothing has changed in that regard. He knows a whole lot more than you do about hardware cache design, just to pick one off the top of the stack.
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"At some point, in order to properly leverage your expertise and knowledge, you have to manage other people, helping them become more productiv"
That makes no sense whatsoever. If someone is an expert in their field then they're the best person to undertake tasks in it. By all means train up other people but that doesn't mean you have to stop doing it yourself or become someones nanny - ie a manager.
Management is simply a move sideways (sorry, its not a promotion) when someone can't do their current technica
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Nowhere in my short post I claimed you had to stop doing it yourself. Only that you couldn't be the only person doing it (in your words, "train up other people"). But since the amount of time is limited in a day, you can't add training other people on top of what you are already doing; if you have hit a productivity limit from time constraint, doing an additional thing (trainin
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Linus has been a manager since day one, he actually stepped back from that more than stepping back from technical involvement. Note how he "parsed" (popular abuse of the word) his words. He says he isn't a developer. He did not say he is not a reviewer, or editor.
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What important code?
Re: Mid sixties here, (Score:3)
Almost everyone here who has coded has written something that was important to someone for some non-zero period of time.
Give the dude a break (Score:2)
He owes people nothing at this point. His only concern is enduring his legacy isnt run into the ground. He is wealthy enough to retire. Thats the goal right? To make enough you dont have to work anymore? If I were him I would buy some property in the Caribbean, maybe on a us virgin island, maybe western coast of Costa Rica. I think he has earned the right to phone it in. He doesnt owe anyone anything.
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He is wealthy enough to retire. Thats the goal right? To make enough you dont have to work anymore?
For some. Others won't stop until they're billionaires, even though they could have retired long ago. If I had a project that was so intimately tied to me for so long I don't think I could just walk out on it. Linus could hand down as much of his job as he'd like to his lieutenants and go into a more ceremonial/board of directors role any time if he wanted less work. You can't really compare his position to your average wage slave.
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Linus does not give a shit about money, beyond the many tens of millions he already has.
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Um, the goal in life (shouldn't be) to be wealthy enough to retire. How sad.
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i hope your not my age.... because about now I'd love nothing more than to be wealthy enough to do what I want, when I want. Normally you post rational stuff, so I figure maybe you are younger. But Linus cannot be too much younger than me. Life gets exhausting. I had already been trained to be a nuclear engineer for the navy, served three tours in the persian gulf, and had the misfortune of seeing my first wife fuck the entire base while I was deployed before I turned 25. At the age of 49 I am getting to t
Re: Give the dude a break (Score:5, Interesting)
Linus is about a month younger than me.
I work to do the job right, because frankly I don't trust most other programmers. Comes of fixing their crap.
I consider programming enjoyable, not a chore. Couldn't give a damn if I'm still coding into my 90s. I like solving problems and that's a category of problem.
Spend my time away from keyboards solving different problems for other organizations. Archaeology, history, maths, I don't care, it's call problem solving and all fun.
Linus went a different road. He's a lot richer, and probably happier overall, but I doubt he's as happy at what he's doing.
How can I be so sure? Because he has a similar mind to me, albeit considerably smarter. Same dynamics, though. He's never going to be happy retired or merely managing.
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Linus went a different road. He's a lot richer, and probably happier overall, but I doubt he's as happy at what he's doing.
Huh? He's happier than a pig in shit. He has the best of both worlds: can float in a drop a few technical nukes when he feels like it, or do what he likes most, post carefully crafted and archiveable emails for the history books.
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I work to do the job right, because frankly I don't trust most other programmers
And when you are gone, there will be people who finger your code into nothingness and have a tangled messed that if you were around, would be fuming about. Fuck the "I do the job right" mentality. That literally has zero longevity. If you do care about good code, you're are going to have to drop the trust issues you have with other people pronto, otherwise everything you are working on today will mean nothing given enough time. If you vest your trust in only yourself, you'll end up with a completely mea
Actually he's still doing his stuff (Score:2)
He's never going to be happy retired or merely managing.
That's why, If you've looked to recent history, every now and then he's taken upon himself to solve one of his problem with code.
He's not writing linux code anymore, BUT he has created git (to scratch his own itch around managing patches efficiently and most version control system sucking badly back then), and he has also written sub-surface (to scratch an itch coming from his scuba diving hobby).
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Linus had a rough patch back around the turn of the century, and another one a couple of years ago that was about nothing technical, but for the most part has remained full of technical energy and stays current. His skill level is on the other side of the moon compared to the average programmer, still is.
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I think you may be confused about the definitions of "able to" and "retire".
"able to" != "forced to"
"retire" != "sit in a rocking chair waiting to die"
Wealthy enough to retire simply means that what you do, when you do it and how you do it are 100% up to you (within the limits of what's legal and physically possible) rather than imposed on you by somebody who controls the paycheck you need to buy food, keep living in your home, get medical treatment, etc.
If you enjoy 100% of everything you are paid to do an
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Architect vs Coder (Score:4, Insightful)
In my job, people regard me as a hardware architect more than coder (of System Verilog RTL, python and C mostly).
This comes from years of coding, during which I developed some important circuits for my employer with cunning designs.
Then they promote you and want you to write documents describing things to be coded by others.
I find that problematic, because all my most cunning designes were arrived at iteratively, coding up solutions, identifying problems and then refining the solution until it worked for being coded, its size and efficiency, debugability, testability on the lab bench and in high volume manufacturing and solving the problems of remaining secure while remaining testable.
So I still code RTL and Python and C when coming up with my designs, document them and them throw the code and documents over to the rest of the team to beat it into submission, test it and help kick it into shape for mass production.
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The term "Architect" also struck me as pretentious. It mostly means "I hacked up solutions for years but now they gave me a new title now that I am older so they don't have to pay me more money"
Re:Architect vs Coder (Score:5, Informative)
I've known many "architects" and the title means different things at different organizations:
In one place, the architect attended conferences, went golfing, and pitched high-level things like "Sharepoint" or "Service Oriented Architecture" to the CXOs.
In another place, the architect was more of a technical manager or CTO type who sometimes did diagrams.
In another place, it was the all-around smartest coder you ever knew.
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Most of them seem to entail either managing people, or doing more documentation, or managing people and doing more documentation.
Oh, and meetings, all of them involve more meetings.
I love coding, I earn enough money, I've tried the "promotional" routes, but have hated it every single time.
I will continue coding till the day I die, but as I get older it seems people expect me to be in one of the pr
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The term "Architect" also struck me as pretentious
Always makes me think of "Grand Architect Gates" and how, by incompetence and hubris, he fucked up so badly that Longhorn became the biggest and most ignominious technical failure in all of history.
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Windows 7 was a pretty good OS.
And Gates also made people pay for their early Alpha release of windows 7, still codenamed Windows Vista. He's a genius, you are just not looking the grand scheme of things.
The correct term is... (Score:5, Insightful)
...editor; he is an editor. The Linux Editor-in-Chief and, in my opinion, has done a great job of it. Thank you for your work, Linus.
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Or just a maintainer. Review code, have a trained eye to bugs and design flaws, and accept or reject changes.
Well thanks (Score:1)
Whatever it is you call it, thanks for doing it
it only matters (Score:2)
it only matters if he regrets that he's no longer a programmer.
i'm sure he's happy with it, because i don't see Linus as somebody who do something for long if he didn't like it.
He's a manager now (Score:2)