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Comment by bluecalm | Hacker News Reader

You're in the minority but you're not the only one. You can see the sentiment expressed about Rust community a lot. Super nice - don't ever say anything that may upset someone - kind of atmosphere is off-putting to many. I for one wouldn't want to work in such environment but I would love to work with Linus.

The problem is that people who prefer direct non-bs communication are also usually more emotionally mature and better at adjusting to others. They will keep quiet or look to move somewhere else but will rarely complain. Meanwhile easily upset and less stable people complain more readily and usually louder to force others to adopt their preferred style of communication (which often comes down to "don't criticize me and use the kind of language I prefer")

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You can be super nice and not upset anybody without compromising on technical rigour.

> The problem is that people who prefer direct non-bs communication are also usually more emotionally mature and better at adjusting to others.

I would argue this is entirely false. If they can't adjust to others finding their behaviour offensive by not being offensive, they're not "better at adjusting to others". Yes, this is a two-way street, but that doesn't automatically mean everyone has to be comfortable with the guy who swears at you and calls you an idiot for writing a patch they didn't like.

We can have technical discussions without personal attacks, without rude language, without racial or sexist slurs. We manage it at my work all the time, although I for one think I could still do this better.

It's difficult when we grow up in a culture which glorifies violence and "macho" behaviour, where most of us in the field are male and have been told all our lives that we're expected to be strong and independent and assertive.

And honestly, if you can't find a way to explain why an idea is bad on a technical level without offending someone, maybe you don't have a good enough reason to criticise it, or you need to think about it some more to figure out why you don't like it apart from your initial reaction.

You can be super nice and not upset anybody without compromising on technical rigour.

That's the ideal. In practice there are always people, a minority, who can't or won't separate criticism of their work from criticism of themselves regardless of how nicely it's put. And then you have a problem.

Fortunately these people are mostly outside the technical realm, where direct criticism of work is very rare.

>Fortunately these people are mostly outside the technical realm, where direct criticism of work is very rare.

I think this sort of special snowflake attitude is part of the problem. There are plenty of other fields where people's work gets directly criticized. Tech is not uniquely (or even unusually) rational or meritocratic.

I was thinking in the context of a tech company, where you also have non-technical business people.

Yes, obviously in some fields tough peer review is also common.

But non-technical business people in a tech company do get their work criticized.

That's extremely rare, in my experience. Nowhere near what developers go through.

It's rare even for basic things like spelling errors or typos to be pointed out, let alone more serious problems like a presentation containing statements that are wrong or vague, meaningless, etc. If people get their work criticised so easily why are there so many spreadsheet errors around, why are there so many vacuous PowerPoints and business processes that go round in circles leaving behind furious customers?

I've witnessed all this first hand. I've also seen what happens when programmers and non-programmers in a tech firm get accidentally mixed together: the programmers start pointing out mistakes in the non-programmers work and cause an "incident" because the others aren't used to being peer reviewed like that.

> Fortunately these people are mostly outside the technical realm, where direct criticism of work is very rare.

No, no, no. Why do you think that?

Example: a central part of artistic practice in art/design schools and professional work is what is known as "the crit". It's where they gather and show their work to each other and then proceed to shred the fuck out of it (with widely varying degrees of politeness).

Similar kinds of things happen with writers, marketing and film-making.

The only place where this stuff doesn't happen is perhaps some business/finance domains where outcomes are strictly evaluated by some ROI measure and maybe compliance.

Art? Any criticism of art is always inherently subjective, it can easily be blown off as the critic not getting it, not liking that style of art, etc. I mean if someone presents to me some totally abstract splashes of paint style work, and I criticise it by saying it doesn't look like anything and can they please redo it to be much more photo-realistic, are they going to accept the correctness of my words and the failure of their efforts, or are they going to rationalise it away as repolfx not being the kind of guy who likes modern art so why even bother?

To receive the sort of criticism I'm talking about, you need to produce things that are objectively good or objectively bad, and you need to be forced to accept when you produced something objectively bad on a regular basis. Criticism that can be easily written off doesn't count.

Go look at most people in a business, and the most or all of what they produce is ultimately evaluated by other people. It's not something the laws of physics have any say in. Whenever work is being subjectively evaluated by other people the standards and levels of criticism involved are way, way lower than anything engineers get subjected to. I've only very rarely seen business documents get put through the wringer in the way complex code reviews are every day.

> Art? Any criticism of art is always inherently subjective, it can easily be blown off as the critic not getting it, not liking that style of art, etc.

I chose Art as an example simply because it was the farthest thing from a technical field and thus refutes the assertion that "direct criticism" in non-technical realms is rare.

All I am stating is that criticism of work is a central component of art (and other non-tech domains). It is not "rare".

You are saying that art criticism is "subjective" and that therefore it "doesn't count"-- that's your personal opinion that I don't care to argue about. Subjectivity is as much a part of the human experience as anything else.

> I mean if someone presents to me some totally abstract splashes of paint style work, and I criticise it by saying it doesn't look like anything and can they please redo it to be much more photo-realistic, are they going to accept the correctness of my words and the failure of their efforts, or are they going to rationalise it away as repolfx not being the kind of guy who likes modern art so why even bother?

Is there really such a big difference to criticizing a software design? Or a UX decision? Most creative work takes places in areas where taste/style/culture and craft/precision/technique meet.

    In practice there are always people, a minority, 
    who can't or won't separate criticism of their 
    work from criticism of themselves regardless

Sure, absolutely.

But consider the topic at hand. We're talking about Linus referring to people and/or their work as "brain dead" and things like that. It really doesn't take one of your snowflakes to take something like that personally.

There are a lot of times (in sports as well as software development) when I've received harsh feedback and been 100% fine with it. But it's not always appropriate.

Your explanation of it relating to emotional maturity doesn't really resonate with me.

I prefer direct, but polite, communication. I've not taken any sort of test to measure my "emotional maturity" but if my career has been any sort of measure I'm reasonably emotionally mature (more years spent in leadership than not, plenty of folks following me from one organization to the next).

My take: I think a lot of this is a cultural thing, particularly relating to showing respect. You either grow up in that sort of culture, or you don't. Or otherwise, you lack the emotional EQ to pick-up up the commonly accepted cultural mores. How do I know this? Share some of your exciting exchanges with friends and family and see how they react.

When I share what I consider to be some of the more abrasive experiences with folks that I grew up (or are otherwise friends outside of the industry) they're always curious how it doesn't come to fisticuffs. We just never talked to one another that way. Where I grew up, it's fucking rude to talk to one another the way Linus and others like him do. Give respect, get respect.

But personal insults are not direct non-bs communication. Saying to someone they should have been an abortion is not a sign of emotional maturity. Accepting denigriating insults without complaint is not a sign of strength or emotional maturity.

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