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by ben0x539 1934 days ago
Getting jaded is a good excuse for taking a step back and reevaluating your life choices, and maybe finding another hobby. It's not a good excuse for going out of your way to hurt the feelings of people who aren't measuring up to your standards.
1 comments
andrewzah 1934 days ago
I don’t disagree that Linus has gone way overboard when chewing people out. The language in some of his rants is completely inappropriate, and he has since apologized for that. But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

“maybe finding another hobby”

It’s very easy to sit here in our armchairs and go “yeah he should just abandon his project”. I’m not sure how any of us would react to one of our projects growing to the scale linux has, but blithely suggesting one should just swap careers or hobbies (since programming is -just- a hobby apparently) is not productive at all.

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ben0x539 1934 days ago
We're talking about the point where someone has become jaded enough that they can't help themselves from lashing out at well-intentioned strangers. That's a fairly advanced level of jaded. I definitely consider myself jaded but I probably have a long way to go before I get there. I'm not saying you have to retrain into a different career path, but I think at that point it's not unreasonable to reflect on whether what you're doing with your spare time is really making you happy, and whether you wouldn't be better off for purely selfish reason if you gave up on project management and idk wrote some scuba software.

> But if someone who 100% knew better did something they shouldn’t have, sometimes getting chewed out is appropriate.

I don't think this is unqualifiedly the case, and I very much don't think this is the case in a situation where a hapless stranger's transgressions only go as far as wasting five minutes of your time by making an unacceptable pull request.

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andrewzah 1931 days ago
"whether you wouldn't be better off for purely selfish reason if you gave up on project management and idk wrote some scuba software"

It's selfish to assume that because you might be happy doing that, then all people should do that. Maybe he wants to work on Linux? Nobody is forced to contribute to or work on his project.

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