Could be, but having seen a couple of his crashouts, I don't really feel like buying that. According to his Wikipedia page, he's also been living in the States for about 25 years, and been a citizen for 15. If he couldn't achieve appropriate mastery of the English language with so much time spent collaborating with others using it essentially exclusively, and having lived for decades in a country where it is the native everyday language, I'd find that legitimately more impressive than the opposite.
This isn't mastery of the English language, he's mastered it fine. This is mastery of American working culture, which is optional. The reason why he grates Americans so much is because he's direct about his feedback, which Americans take as anger.
To me (a Greek), what he says is fine. He never gets personal, he talks about the arguments/points/issues, not the person. "complete garbage arguments" is a judgement of the arguments, not of the person, and it's fine to tell someone their arguments are garbage, if that's what you think about them.
Americans/Canadians/the English will interpret that as anger, but, in other cultures, it's just voicing one's opinion.
Well I'll be damned then, cause (old example that came my way) ...
> Key, I'm f*cking tired of the fact that you don't fix problems in the
code *you* write, so that the kernel then has to work around the
problems you cause.
... this is getting personal, this is being knowingly crass, this is universally offensive (albeit fairly mild), and I have extremely serious doubts that in Greek being told that people are fucking tired of your behavior is "just voicing one's opinion".
You also have to appreciate that this is from an email. You don't type out an email like this and hit send without being really quite content with it. I cannot personally imagine sending an email (or even a text message) like this to anyone at work, for example, and there have been times where they definitely would have deserved this and then some.
There are communities and workplaces where this type of communication is the norm, yes, and it used to be especially common in the past (and from what I know, still often is in blue collar jobs). This is true both in and outside of America.
I'm not from America, I'm from Central-Europe. I know what being "direct and upfront" is like, and this is not that. This is just being a twat. Language like this is never productive or acceptable in any culture, and it's not some American mind-virus spreading around the world that made people figure they can and should afford to have standards regarding their interactions with one another.
If anything, the trendy bit here is the opposite, where people seem to make a sport out of mischaracterizing being crass as saying hard truths. Just like how cynicism is often mistaken as intellectualism, this is also utterly misguided, and Linus is being washed of his personal faults out of respect, not because he's not at fault in reality.
I'm a central European as well and i do not only think Linus's tone is okay, I'm actually more comfortable around people like him. I find this watch-your-words culture repressive, and being with people who use and tolerate the "bad words" as well is liberating.
Ultimately that's on everyone to decide on their own. I personally feel the exact opposite way, that although having to mind my speech gets really quite annoying at times, and that there are communities who for whatever reason really overdo it, I really do not wish to participate in communities where the disregard of it, in the form of a quasi rebellious attitude, has taken deep cultural root.
The best of both worlds for me is when I can naturally just mingle with others without this issue cropping up, because the chemistry just works out on its own. I miss and greatly cherish those people I've met over the years who I was able to collaborate and spend time with like that. Instead of subscribing to either extreme, that's the kind of interaction I'm actually wishing to experience more of.
Regrettably, I feel this has been becoming less and less likely over time, which I attribute to the growing distrust and hostility among people at large, as well as the countless other (what I perceive as) dysfunctional social dynamics on the internet these days (e.g. mainstream political activism and counteractivism on community spaces of all kinds). And then who knows.
I don't think anyone here is saying that the problem are the "bad words" themselves.
I'd wager that a lot of people here are probably fine with someone shouting "motherfucker" at a problem in your screen, or saying that something is "fucking stupid", but draw the line at shouting or telling this to a person... especially in a public email, and even more especially when you're in a position of power over them.
As South European living in Central Europe, and having worked for several years at Nokia, I also don't have an issue with Linus.
In fact I do happen to land in traps in Germany and UK, where when being more frontal at work turns bad, because apparently we have to be all smiles, and complain in a positive way with euphemisms.
A technique that I have improved over the years, talk back with the feeback level expected from the target culture, when I know their background beforehand.
"I'm fucking tired of the fact that you don't fix problems in the code you write" doesn't make any judgement about the person, it makes a factual judgement of what they did. He didn't say "you're a bad coder", he said "you create bugs and then don't fix them".
Sure, he could have omitted the word "fucking" there, which doesn't add much, but "I'm tired of the fact that you don't fix the problems in your code" is really good, direct, honest feedback.
I understand that the person receiving it might feel bad, but they might also feel bad with "I've noticed that sometimes you tend to leave some bugs unfixed, even if perhaps they were caused by your own commits". When you give feedback, you should steer away from making personal judgements, focus on the facts, and deliver the feedback calmly, and Linus' sentence hits two of the three, which isn't too bad.
Anglo cultures really do tend to walk on eggshells to avoid hurting feelings, which other cultures might find tiring and somewhat disingenuous.
> "I'm tired of the fact that you don't fix the problems in your code" is really good, direct, honest feedback.
I disagree. I don't see why Linus being tired or not is technically relevant at all. Leading with it makes it sound like he's looking for the guy to stop tiring him, rather than actually remediate his lapses in self-review.
Being courteous is not about avoiding a negative experience at all costs, it's about being considerate of it, keeping in mind that it exists. If you know you're going to tell the guy they're causing issues, then not making that about how fucking tired that makes you feel shows that you're not trying to mess with their head, but trying to actually address the issue. It's specifically to avoid the ambiguity on whether he has a problem with the person or what they're doing, since when insulted, people tend to reasonably assume they're being found to be problematic.
I really don't think this is all that culture specific, and that this is just some freak cultural mismatch having been ongoing for decades. Not ethnic cultural at least.
Maybe it is not exactly culture-specific, but most of your post definitely sounds to me like "walking on eggshells" stavros mentioned.
Tbh I agree that your citation of Linus' email was an example of not exactly productive conversation. But preventing such emotion ventillation takes effort, same as not feeling insulted when your work is criticized. And who should put in the emotional effort is imo at least partially influenced by cultural expectations.
I don't think these are mutually exclusive, and I also don't think that this is a scenario where that Key person just needed to put in effort to not feel insulted when their work was criticized, because it was them and their behavior that was criticized, not their work.
If wanting others to not say things like how they're "fucking tired of someone else or their behavior" is making them walk on eggshells, and can remain elusive to them for decades out of cultural differences, then clearly I'm taking crazy pills, because that's just about the most outlandish proposal I've ever come across.
