Another Reason To Hire Great Managers

Too many companies make the mistake of promoting programmers to management despite the fact that they are awful managers. I’ve long thought Linux suffered from that problem and Torvalds threatening to laugh in the face of contributors who submit new features after the 2 week window at the start of each new version’s development.

Linus Torvalds has threatened that if developers add ’last-minute things’ to the next version of the Linux kernel he will ‘refuse to merge, and laugh in their faces derisively’ Laughing in people’s faces is never acceptable behavior and threatening to do so is childish and demoralizing. It definitely doesn’t help to build community which is what opensource lives on. It might be a very good idea to limit new features to the first 2 weeks of development (though fixing known bugs before adding new features also has a lot of merit), and being very strict about it might be the best thing. Regardless, childish tantrums are not appropriate in software development.