> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
And
> I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there's a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory. — also Brian Cantrill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m)
Wired did an article about high tech connected homes. The section on Larry Ellison had an anecdote about how Larry got frustrated with his system and threw the remote at a wall, smashing it.
He made one of the engineers drive out to his house with a new one on a Saturday night.
Now, the fact that this story is true is telling enough, but what sort of experience did the writers have with Larry that inspired them to put in that story that paints him as a petty, tyrannical manchild?
Ehh...Larry has a point. If you care about noise levels, don't use weight as a proxy - just use noise levels. Why can a big, quiet plane not land at night, but a tiny noisy plane can?
As the other guy says, it's hard to prove in court which noise came from which plane, but besides that, they may have used weight as a proxy for distinguishing between military and civilian aircraft ("tiny noisy planes" tending to be military), and, also, perceived loudness[1] is a function of both decibel level[2] and pitch[3] (that is, a whistle will be at a higher decibel level than a drum we perceive as equally "loud"). It's intuitively plausible that larger planes tend to make lower-pitched sounds.
"It is regrettable that a dispute about one airplane has consumed so large a quantity of human and economic resources and that the parties have found compromise so difficult"
So much hate. Just because someone has enough money to file a lawsuit and keep it alive for years doesn't mean the other side should somehow be penalized for not compromising with the fool.
> He made one of the engineers drive out to his house with a new one on a Saturday night.
Did it occur to anyone that that engineer might be happy to be picked as the one to drive out and do that? To some people that is the way to get noticed and stand out with the boss (or king, whatever).
> tyrannical manchild?
Like any anecdote we don't know the full story here and exact circumstances. Just the fact that juxtaposed against what people have be told about Ellison it appears that he must certainly be 'a tyrannical manchild'.
It's the first time I read this blog post (thanks for sharing) but it's not surprising to me.
I always cringe when I see people quoting Bryan because that's exactly my experience interacting with him on mailing lists or watching him give talks.
At this point I don't have the energy to deal with people like him. I just accept him as a natural occurrence in our field. I certainly praise does who do have the energy for fighting that.
I'm also quite combative in discussions. And then someone told me: be careful not to win the battle (current conversation) and lose the war (attention and possibly the respect or friendship of the person you're talking to).
> some people find his aggressively dismissive style personally abusive and distressing.
Thank you for pointing this out.
There are many cases of what I call the "brilliant jerk" in programming.
Personally, I deal very badly with confrontational behavior. And it makes me rather sad. If I can deal with people by being friendly (or at least polite) and soft-spoken, it can't be that hard, now, can it?
And there are some examples of brilliant programmers that are also nice people and very pleasant to deal with. Richard Hipp of SQLite and Fossil seems to be this kind of person. If I cannot be as brilliant as him, at least I want to be as friendly and respectful as him.
It seems that a lot of software projects have begun adopting codes of conduct. I tend to feel a little ambivalent about this phenomenon, because it attempts to codify things I think should be the natural state of people interacting. But maybe in the long run, it is necessary to be a little more formal about this.
And still, when Bryan Cantrill gets sufficiently worked up about a subject, he is very entertaining to listen to.
Personally, I have a hard time favouring diversity and safe spaces over good software and solid architecture where the two goals compete. I'm also aware that the competitive streak in me pushes me to excel, and without it - without an element of technological one-upmanship in my personality - I'd be much less ambitious and I'd have achieved far less.
So overall I don't think Bryan is wrong, per se, to take the tack he does within the pool he plays in; it's just a pool for type-A personalities (in the system dev domain), and not the right place to play in if you're starting out, or are otherwise fragile. Build up your skin and chops in smaller ponds first. Stay out of them if you don't feel comfortable swimming there, because the discomfort of competition actually serves a purpose for those swimmers.
(Yes, some people can pursue and sustain excellence without the heat of competition. But not everyone is like that.)
I'm not sure how extreme a claim you are making. What you wrote could also be interpreted as asserting that the status quo (macho, competitive, whatever) should be preserved because of the contribution made by guys who thrive on that. And that it's too bad if some other people choose not to contribute as a result.
I can't imagine how collaborators on a single codebase could self-select into different groups with different communication styles. By Conway's Law, the codebase would have to be restructured and factored into parts that the groups could work on in relative isolation. This is a big architectural obligation to incur for the sake of preserving some casual braggadocio or competitive inconsiderateness.
Machines are one of the only things most people are familiar with that don't hold to all the same values that living beings (humans, other mammals, most vertebrates) usually do. (You might call Ellison a "force of nature", but that might not play well for people who attribute an "eventually-consistent omnibenevolence" to nature.)
Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.) Where human values and corporate values are in conflict, Ellison has chosen to forget about his human values and, effectively, become the avatar of the corporation's interests. He's the "ideal CEO", in about the same way as Locutus of Borg is an ideal CEO.
I am seriously disliking the current debt-based economy now for this reason and more. There are other examples of its effects like Mozilla, Google, and VCs (I have several Twitter threads with @BrendanEich about that one). Sun and Oracle are probably worth mentioning here too, including Jonathan Schwartz.
> Really, without the metaphor, what's going on is that Larry Ellison has modified himself to hold the values that a corporation holds, in order to more efficiently drive said corporation toward optimizing on its corporate goals (i.e. increase share value, etc.)
Hmm. I wonder why this augmentation is newsworthy/nontrivial/frightening. Perhaps our human frailty makes this feat truly difficult even for an average CEO?
I suppose because (like the Paperclip Maximizer analogy mentioned in this thread) maximizing your immediate profits is not the same thing as maximizing shareholder value. It is unlikely that trying to get a professor sacked does anything but reduce your shareholder value. This kind of behavior does not make you the ultimate CEO and other humans know it, it makes you an asshole. So it's not difficult, it's just worse.
Why is it frightening for somebody to focus solely on accumulating lucre and not to care about other people or society at all? Because hurting people is bad.
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphising Larry Ellison. You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle. — Brian Cantrill (https://youtu.be/-zRN7XLCRhc?t=33m1s)
And
> I actually think that it does a dis-service to not go to Nazi allegory because if I don't use Nazi allegory when referring to Oracle there's some critical understanding that I have left on the table […] in fact as I have said before I emphatically believe that if you have to explain the Nazis to someone who had never heard of World War 2 but was an Oracle customer there's a very good chance that you would explain the Nazis in Oracle allegory. — also Brian Cantrill (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79fvDDPaIoY&t=24m)