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Linus Torvalds: 'I'm not a programmer anymore'
Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator, doesn't make speeches anymore. But, what he does do, and he did again at Open Source Summit Europe in Lyon France is have public conversations with his friend Dirk Hohndel, VMware's Chief Open Source Officer. In this keynote discussion, Torvalds revealed that he doesn't think he's a programmer anymore.
So what does the person everyone thinks of as a programmer's programmer do instead? Torvalds explained:
I don't know coding at all anymore. Most of the code I write is in my e-mails. So somebody sends me a patch ... I [reply with] pseudo code. I'm so used to editing patches now I sometimes edit patches and send out the patch without having ever tested it. I literally wrote it in the mail and say, 'I think this is how it should be done,' but this is what I do, I am not a programmer.
So, Hohndel asked, "What is your job?" Torvalds replied, "I read and write a lot of email. My job really is, in the end, is to say 'no.' Somebody has to say 'no' to [this patch or that pull request]. And because developers know that if they do something that I'll say 'no' to, they do a better job of writing the code."
Torvalds continued, "Sometimes the code changes are so obvious that no messages [are] really required, but that is very very rare." To help your code pass muster with Torvalds it helps to ''explain why the code does something and why some change is needed because that in turn helps the managerial side of the equation, where if you can explain your code to me, I will trust the code."
In short, these days Torvalds is a code manager and maintainer, not a developer. That's fine with him: "I see one of my primary goals to be very responsive when people send me patches. I want to be like, I say yes or no within a day or two. During a merge, the day or two may stretch into a week, but I want to be there all the time as a maintainer."
That's what code maintainers should do.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by bradley13 on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:08PM (5 children)
I think every technical person reaches a time where they lose some of the joy of tech. I used to stay up-to-date on as many different aspects of tech as I could. I was actively using multiple programming langauges, keeping up with the latest hardware news. Always updating to the latest OS, database server, playing with admin tools, etc, etc, etc, etc...
Eventually, sometime in my late 40s, I started to find the continual changes irritating rather than interesting. Yet another JS framework, whoopie. Why, exactly, did PHP need to add OO? Wow, another set of oddball codes added to the already overloaded x86 instruction set. Why do we need JSON when we have XML? More junk added to CSS that violates the original principles of the web. Yet another arcane UI designed at 3am by a stoner, ugh. On top of that, many of the changes are re-inventing the wheel, by clever young folk who don't know what came before. This is especially true when it comes to things where consultants earn their bucks - project management methodologies and the like. They've all been done before, in trivially different ways, with different terminology for the same concepts.
Some people get fed up with the hamster wheel earlier, others seem to manage to avoid it until much later. Give me something genuinely new, and I'm there and interested. Give me fake-functional programming in Java, or some other poorly conceived idea, and...yawn.
Another problem is, of course, that no employer pays for you to stay current, at least, not outside the tech you use in your job. That means that this is your free time. If you have a family, if you have other hobbies, there just aren't enough hours in the day to keep it up. Eventually, you're going to burn out, or you're going to lose touch. The pace of change is relentless, and mostly useless...
Now, get off my lawn.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Wednesday October 30 2019, @04:52PM
This has to be one of the most irritating attributes of the industry. The hundreds of person-years, the billions of dollars that must get wasted on reimplementing the exact same functionality using some new fad technology (which itself is probably just a bit of lipstick and some different buzzwords put on an older technology), over and over again.
I'd say a good 50-60% of software development work is therefore like getting paid to dig holes and fill them in again. But management seem to fall for it, again and again. On the plus side, I suppose at least that kind of work is doing less damage to the environment than someone working in manufacturing or the mining industry, although there is the wasted electricity of running all the computers.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 5, Interesting) by acid andy on Wednesday October 30 2019, @05:09PM
I'd also add that these religious obsessions with reinventing libraries, languages and methodologies without adding any genuinely new power to what came before are probably the mark of a bad software developer. A good coder can see if programs written using two different technologies are functionally equivalent--and if they both compile to equivalent machine code then all that is left to differentiate them is higher level things like readability, type safety, expressive power, and how experienced a team is with that language.
I can see a case for the development of new languages, or libraries, to improve security, take better advantage of parallelism, or support new technologies like quantum computing. If on the other hand it's just a new flavor of the same old stuff, as far as I'm concerned it's just an excuse to boast and to sell books, software licenses and training courses.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 30 2019, @07:28PM (2 children)
Good God, we're living this annoyance. My wife has been project managing for almost 30 years, but now all jobs require a PMP Certification. It's the new fad for program managers. It is the MCSE certificate of program management. It is all run by a company that charges you a lot of money to take a course and test to be "certified", and this certification is only good for a limited amount of time before you have to pay them again to be certified. It is a huge scam, but I guess now that Management probably burned out on "black belts" and other nonsense, they have moved on to this scam.
She now has to decide whether to play the game or say "fuck off".
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday October 31 2019, @12:45PM (1 child)
Get a few friends together, start up the Project Masters Institute and issue your own certifications.
Now, for testing : Ask her for a sandwich.
- If it's a good sandwich, make her a Project Management Professional
- If it's a crappy sandwich make her a Project Management Consultant
- If she gets the kids to make it, make her a Manager of Project Management Professionals.
- If you get a beer with it, make her Supreme Master of Project Management
- If you don't get a sandwich, make her an MBA.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Thursday October 31 2019, @07:33PM
What if you get a burrito or a hot dog?