| > leadership that (mostly) works (in the military) I'd say by everyday metrics, military leadership doesn't work. It is incredibly wasteful, structurally leading to the $5K hammers and an entire year to design an official face mask. It also utilizes and requires a "punishment is one misstep away" dynamic - without which there would be no functional lower levels of the pyramid, and higher levels would look very different. You treat an engineer badly, they leave their job and possibly go to your competitor. You treat a soldier/pilot badly, and ... you can keep doing that for quite a while. Steve Jobs' management style was, perhaps, the closest SV can get to military style. It works, but I wouldn't work there. And Jobs paid people handsomely to endure that. On the other hand, there's Linus Torvalds. He has incredibly effective leadership, over almost 30 years now, without hiring people, without even paying them, yet still getting a lot done. Not entirely flat hierarchy, but anyone is one email away from Linus (though not one commit away); No planned career advancement or horizon, and no strategic training. I've seen many projects on the spectrum between Jobs and Torvalds, and in my experience the Jobs side of the scale is not generally more successful. |
He is not effective on my scale: he has alienated a huge amount of contributors with his abusive style of communication.
And please do not say that it is necessary for "filtering" and quality assurance, it is equivalent to justifying mobbing.
Another unsuccessful aspect I blame him for is the sorry status of the kernel security, "a bug is a bug" and similar stuttering nonsense.