Yes Linus Torvalds is an asshole and the world is better because of it.

In short Linus's acid takes on code quality over developer fee fee's might be one of the things that has made the Linux kernel and the GNU/Linux project such a long lasting open source success and in my opinion the risk of him falling for all this "let's be nice and non offensive" bs trend may impact negatively on code quality.

Being an asshole has it's downsides and it's not always the best response, I'll give you that, but personally I think most of us who are viewed as assholes are seen like that because we put quality over convenience, facts before feelings and dedication over mediocrity; it is not because we hate you, it's because we measure ourselves with the same stick.

It depends on one's character, but when you've been toughened up because of bullying(I don't doubt many devs have been since being a nerd has never been hip) or life in general, you learn to stop whining & pick yourself up and you expect everyone to be competitive and competent as you are and it gets frustrating to manage people who don't fulfill your expectations.

Pros: You get shit done and you do it well.
Cons: People won't like you and you don't tolerate failure (much less mediocrity).

Yes Linus is an asshole, my coach was an asshole, some of my best teacher's have been assholes, I had friends who were assholes, heck I'm an asshole!

But I thank them because they made me better than I was, just as people have thanked me for being the right amount of asshole.

A warm thank you and fuck you Linus, keep being the asshole we need.

Long long ago there was a man who discovered if he scratched certain patterns onto a rock he could use them to remind him about things he would otherwise forgot.

Over time the scratching were refined and this great secret of eternal memory were taught to his children, and they taught it to their children.

Soon mankind had discovered a way to preserve through the ages his thoughts and memories and further discovered that if he wrote down these symbols he could transfer information over distances by simply recording these symbols in a portable medium.

Writing exploded it allowed a genius in one place to communicate the information he had recorded across time and space.

Thousands of years passed, writing continued to be refined and more and more vital. Eventually a humble man by the name of Johannes Gutenberg seeking to make the divine word of God accessible to the people created the printing press allowing the written word to be copied and circulated with great ease expanding vastly the works available to mankind and the number of people who could understand this arcane art of writing.

But mankind never satiated in his desire to know all there is to know demanded more information, demanded it faster, demanded it better. So the greatest minds of 200 years, Marconi, Maxwell, Bohr, Von Nueman, Turing and a host of others working with each other, standing on the shoulders of their brobdinangian predecessors, brought forth a way to send these signals, transfer this writing upon beams of light, by manipulating the very fabric of the cosmos, mankind had reach the ultimate limits of transmission of information. Man has conquered time, and space itself in preserving and transmitting information, we are as the gods!

My point is this, that your insistence upon having a meeting to ask a question, with 10 people that could've been answered with a 2 sentence email, is not only an affront to me for wasting my time, but also serves as an affront to the greatest minds of the 19th and 20th centuries, it is an insult to your ancestors who first sacrificed and labored to master the art of writing, it is in fact offensive to all of humanity up to this point.

In short by requiring a meeting to be held, not only are you ensuring the information is delayed because we all now need to find a time that all of us are available, not only are you now eliminating the ability to have a first hand permanent record of what need to be communicated, you are actively working against progress, you are dragging humanity collectively backwards. You join the esteemed ranks of organizations such as the oppressive Catholic church that sought to silence Galialio and Copernicus, you are among the august crowd that burned witches at Salem, the Soviet secret police that silenced "bourgeoisie" science, you join the side of thousands of years of daft ignorance.

If it were not for you people we would have flying cars, we would have nanobots capable of building things on a whim, we would all be programming in lisp. But because of you and people like you we are trapped in this world, where the greatest minds are trapped in meetings that never end, where mistruth and ignorance run rampant, a world where JavaScript is the de facto language of choice every where because it runs everywhere, and ruins everywhere.

So please remember, next time you want to have a meeting ask yourself first. "Could this be an email?" "Do I enjoy burning witches?" if you do this you might make the world a little bit of a less terrible place to be.

Recently, our team hired an arrogant trainee-junior to the team, who turned out to be mean towards the other developers and in a habit of publicly mocking their opinions and going as far as cursing at them. He steals credit and insults others. He openly admits he's an offensive person and not a team player. When someone from the team speaks, he might break into laughter and say demeaning sentences like "that's so irrelevant oh my god did you really say that? hahaha". Our team consists of polite and introverted engineers who cannot stand up to bullies. Normally this kind of behavior won't be suitable even if you work in a burger shop especially not from a trainee. Let alone trainee, the rude behavior of Linus Torvalds was not tolerated, despite him being in the top position and a recognized star talent in the IT field.

I personally no longer feel comfortable speaking up during teams meetings or in the slack team chat. I'm afraid my opinions will be ridiculed or ashamed - likely will be called "irrelevant". I respond only if I'm directly addressed. We have important features coming up, requested by the customer, but I feel discouraged to publicly ask questions - I sort of feel having to regress into contributing less for the product. I also witness that other younger developers speak less now in meetings and team chat. Feels like everyone is hiding under the bed. Our product team used to have friendly working atmosphere but now the atmosphere is a bit like we're not a team anymore but a knot.

Lesson I learnt from here is: There is a reason why some companies have personality tests and HR interviews. Our proud short boarding process was consisting of a single technical interview. Perhaps at least a team interview should be held before hiring a person to the team, or the new hire should at least be posed a question: are you a team player? Technical skills can be taught more easily than social skills. If some youngster is unable to communicate in a civilized manner for even five minutes, it should raise some red flags. Otherwise you will end up with people who got refused from other companies which knew better.