Linus Torvalds: “Somebody is pushing complete garbage for unclear reasons.”
A lot of people trying to defend being a jerk as necessary in these circumstances. I think Google culture proves the opposite: Googley code and peer reviews, blameless postmortems, and a host of other mechanisms that de-escalate and de-personalize things.<p>The Meltdown work at Google probably didn&#x27;t begin with a rant about morons.<p>It&#x27;s possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and criticize others without inducing flame wars. It only works for Linus because people won&#x27;t go nuclear in the response, but for rank and file engineers, especially of equal stature, if you call someone a moron in a thread, it&#x27;s likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.<p>I&#x27;ve worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. It&#x27;s is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a problem, or reaching agreement faster.