Linus Torvalds Shares His Tips On Working Remotely (zdnet.com) 76
Linus Torvalds tells ZDNet what he's learned about working remotely:
Torvalds admits that when he started, "I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."
Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever.
Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..."
And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.
Of course, just saying "'don't be social' isn't much of a great tip, is it?" Nor, as many extroverts are now finding out, is working from home necessarily at all comfortable. So, Torvalds suggests that you take "advantage of the 'real' upside of working from home: flexibility... Torvalds says, "if you make your new life a '9-5, but from home' kind of thing, I think you're just going to hate your home, yourself and your life. All the downsides, none of the upsides...." He believes that instead of using "video conferencing instead to recreate exactly what we used to do before, you should" try to really change how you work. Use asynchronous communication models: messaging, email, shared calendars, whatever.
Torvalds also recommends carefully tracking the things that you need to do, but argues that if you're spending hours in online meetings from home instead of hours in real-world meetings, "you've just taken the worst part of office life, and brought it home, and made it even worse..."
And the article also includes some tips from James Bottomley, an IBM Research Distinguished Engineer and senior Linux kernel developer who works closely with Torvald. For videoconferencing Bottomley uses NextCloud Talk and Zoom, which he calls a "horrible proprietary app" -- but notes that it does have binaries for every Linux distro.
Summary (Score:3, Funny)
Programmers in their mom's basement have no problems at all.
Introverts are better people. (Score:4, Insightful)
Extroverts spread the plague.
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Extroverts spread the plague.
And they're loud and won't shut up about their Amway "opportunity".
Re: Introverts are better people. (Score:1)
Re: Summary (Score:1)
Blah (Score:1)
Torvalds: "I hate everybody, and don't like to interact with anybody. BE LIKE ME!!!"
That doesn't work for the majority of business models. Yeah, you lucked out that some companies want to pay your foundation to maintain the Linux kernel, so you can sit around and be as flexible as you'd like now (especially now that you basically don't even code anymore, just approve the code of people that are paying you). Overwhelming vast majority don't have this level of flexibility.
I didn't think it was possible... (Score:3, Funny)
Fuck off and die.
Not going well (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not going well (Score:5, Insightful)
don't bother checking stocks or pensions, they'll plump up again when this thing is past and you're just stressing yourself over a temporary value.
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https://www.macrotrends.net/2593/nikkei-225-index-historical-chart-data
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apples and kumquats
this present situation really can't be compared to anything in last 75 years
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No it's actually not a bad comparison. He was effectively saying just because you got fucked by a temporary situation (like having 2 major cities turned to glass and surrendering to a foreign power) doesn't mean your stocks won't go up again.
It's quite relevant to this current economic slowdown due to a response to a pandemic which is very temporary.
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You have to understand the reasons for the economic downturn in the 1990s Japan. The prevailing theory is that Japan stopped spending as their average age trended higher and higher. Very basic: There are so many old people in Japan holding onto their savings and requiring time from the younger generations and not enough young people working and spending as a result, it is not providing sufficient liquidity in the market.
Given 90% of those affected by the Chinese Flu are elderly, this seems like almost an in
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It seems that only Americans call the Covid-19 coronavirus the "Chinese virus".
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WW II completely irrelevant to what happened in Japan in the 90s. It's a bad comparison to present situation, irrelevant and ignorant to even bring it up.
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Yes. Ideally one should have cashed out entirely in December of last year and sometime next month will probably be the time to put all that cash back in. 10,000% return in 4 months would be pretty good.
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One might even think this would be the time to do some investing in index funds, especially in a Roth or 401k or similar, and doubl especially if you are young. Heck I've been thinking of putting $1k worth of one of the index funds into accounts for my kids (aged 9, 16 and 19).
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This experience is totally different for me. I have been working from home for a full week now and it is SO much less stressful than working in the office. But, I have no wife or kids. I don't like crowds and writing code requires concentration which is why it is so hard to do at the office.
Every employer around here has some variant of an open floor plan, none of them want to put programmers in individual offices, so this has been a situation I have had to tolerate. Working from home has been a once-in
Re:Not going well (Score:4, Interesting)
This experience is totally different for me. I have been working from home for a full week now and it is SO much less stressful than working in the office. But, I have no wife or kids. I don't like crowds and writing code requires concentration which is why it is so hard to do at the office.
We used to have an 'open floor' single office, and as we grew, in order to reduce distractions for the engineers, the company decided to have the engineering team have their own offices in a separate area of the building (usually two per room, which worked well because each knew the needs for proper productivity).
Later we experimented with having some work-from-home days (2-3 a week) for the engineering team to see how that worked out. That led to the whole engineering team working from home eventually.
A couple of years ago the company decided on having all staff work from home if they wanted, which has worked out very well for us (medium sized). So when this coronavirus thing hit and everyone needed to work from home, it was basically just business as usual for us.
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It's iffy for me. I don't have a barrage of people stopping by the cube every 5 minutes to ask me something they should already know. But I do have the "beep" from new emails and skype messages arriving all the time too. "Oh look, he's got a green dot that says he's available, I'll call him on skype!"
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"Oh look, he's got a green dot that says he's available, I'll call him on skype!"
Are you suggesting that the green dot is inaccurate? Sounds like user error to me. I don't use Skype, but the IM software I do use accurately indicates whether I am available or not.
I also work with adults, so no one takes offense if I don't reply immediately. In fact, most people start an IM with "do you have time to talk" or something similar even if I have my status set to available.
Pinging someone on IM is far less intrusive for both of us than one person walking over to another person's office and less
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I've been wondering recently if the novel coronavirus might be the death knell for the much-hated open floor plan cubicle offices, particularly the ones where they pack in multiple workers per cubicle. Will businesses return to cubicle-world once the crisis passes, will offices make a comeback, or will telework be the future?
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turns out the manual is 20-30 years old and its been 1
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Completely depends on the structure of work and personality of the people I find. I'm a dev manager in a small company. Rest of the dev team have zero business sense. So they need adult supervision to make sure they don't disappear for 3 days refactoring something instead of doing billable work because they saw something they didn't like and wanted to fix it. They literally won't ask and won't understand when told: hey we told the customer we'd have this next Tuesday we don't have 3 days for you to go off o
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I've worked at a company where they did the Scrum thing, and it worked quite well. I'm guessing that your workplace is too chaotic for that? Just curious?
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Yeah. I've have scrum pushed on me and my team ended up doing kanban, current work smaller projects about 60% of our time. The critical path is all driven by customers and subject to random reprioritization. Customer A asks about a project that only 1 dev can work on, 2 weeks pass, customer B asks for a more general project that anyone can happen, customer B pays first we jump on it, meanwhile customer A decides to go ahead and needs it yesterday and is willing to pay full $250USD/hr nominal rate. Things ge
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Do you ask your "Devs" about the level of risk to the customer is, if they leave their software as is eg. potentially broken or has a weakness or limitation ?
They probably don't tell you about the need for refactoring software to create a "better solution" because they know how you will react by you talking them out of it.
The mentality of managers trying to tell engineers about unmovable deadlines and not listening to dissenting voices was a contributing factor to the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster.
At le
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Yep do and take it into consideration. I'm a dev too. About 60% of my time. Glorified team lead basically because company is small, so I wear the dev project management, IT and dev personnel management. Scenarios I'm getting about is customer paying 250/hr for us to write a report for them that they need tomorrow, and a dev wandering off refactoring all reports for all customers while they are at it. They then can't reverse engineer out how much of that time was doing the customer's thing, or doing the thin
Re: Not going well (Score:1)
Or if you're not married, you can do the five fingered special during a break.
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plus the distraction of checking the web to watch my 401K implode by the hour
Frequently checking stock values on long term investments is useless. You shouldn't have even have checked it when it got overly puffed up by debt and hype in the first place.
For the last couple of years, the whole situation has been reminding me of Kenny Rogers' wisdom: "Don't count your money when it's sitting on the table. They'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done."
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For the last couple of years, the whole situation has been reminding me of Kenny Rogers' wisdom: "Don't count your money when it's sitting on the table. They'll be time enough for counting when the dealing's done."
True. Rest in Peace, Kenny.
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I was just going to reply "Hey, he's still alive", but it looks like you're right, it happened just yesterday. The news has been overshadowed so much that I had to dig to find it.
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Words of wisdom there.
Daily, I follow the market news. But I calculate my losses maybe once a month, if that.
Re:Not going well (Score:5, Interesting)
The wife and kids are home too so there are plenty of distractions
I had a tech-support call with a hardware vendor and software vendor yesterday. All of us were working from home. After a couple hours, two of us noticed a fourth voice... that of a young boy, playing and talking. The hardware vendor asked if someone else was in the conference, and we quickly learned it was the software vendor's son. He wasn't yelling or interrupting... he was just audible occasionally in the background, likely talking to toys or such.
In normal days, that would've been a big business faux-pas. But it had me thinking how healthy and right it felt that this man was helping me with my support issue, but was simultaneously at least physically present with his family. I made it really, really clear the son wasn't bothering me, and that I appreciated the help I was getting.
What I'm saying is that maybe... some of the distractions from our "real lives" might be morale-boosters and ultimately good for our overall well-being. Obviously there's a line, and had his son been preventing him from doing his job that would've crossed it. But merely being audible? Man... I've called into call-centers where I can hear five other support calls being handled. That sucks as compensating for difference in one accent takes brain-power and we don't need to also be filtering out a bunch of others talking about similar topics.
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And this is why so many of us can never go back to an office. Office work is a blocking task that eats up so much physical and mental effort it corrodes your personal life too.
I've taken phone calls and written software cuddling a sick child. That's not stuff you can get away with in an 'office'. Rather than making water cooler talk I can empty the dishwasher or start dinner.
Ignoring the commute time itself, taking 30 minutes to get ready every morning is 125 hours a year. 125 hours of nothing but getting r
Re:Not going well (Score:4, Interesting)
Office work is a blocking task that eats up so much physical and mental effort it corrodes your personal life too.
That's personality, job, and office dependent. Our efficiency has massively decreased the past 2 weeks, the inability to talk to each other easily without calling via skype is a problem in an industry which depends on different disciplines to always talk to each other.
At the same time our company had this thing about hiring extroverts, a lot of companies do because every god damn schmuk needs to be a "leader" these days. THe result of which is some of the people in my team are really not coping.
Talking to one of them the other day I heard a voice in the background and I asked him where he was and he said he went back to the office because he was going mental trying to work from home since he lives with himself. Several are not taking the social isolation well.
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Now imagine growing up telling being told this is the 'only' way to work and that your way of 'meeting together' was frowned upon in multiple industries.
No one is saying we should force everyone to do this permanently, but I hope that multiple industries realize that this is more efficient.
All we're really asking for is the flexibility. There is no one size fits all work environment. Treating software developers like factory workers down to the hour in a central location doesn't work for a lot.
Re:Not going well (Score:4, Interesting)
In normal days, that would've been a big business faux-pas.
I guess client and vendor interactions generally depend on more professionality, but in general I've often had my boss bow out temporarily from a teleconference because of child came in the room, and pretty much everyone in my team has met my pet cat too on a video chat.
As working from home becomes normal the idea that the home life and work life may interfere gets normalised too.
Funny side story my wife got up yesterday. Went into the bathroom to put on makeup, threw on a nice looking jumper and sat down in the living room to teach 60 math students via skype. The notable omission there, she didn't take off her pajamas but as long as she didn't stand up from the table and show off the pajama shorts who would know :-)
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Now you've done it. Once the word gets out, *all* tele-school students are going to find a reason to ask their teacher to stand up.
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I'm still waiting for the wife to show up as an internet meme after teach half a class with a cat sitting on her shoulder.
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I have worked from home for years and when my children were small it was very difficult. Now that they are grown up and have moved out I absolutely love working from home. But I don't assume that my personality matches others. I'm a pretty extreme extrovert. Social distancing and staying at home is pretty much just another day for me. The only real difference is I'm preparing to not have to go out to buy groceries - but that's actually kind of fun because I despite going grocery shopping anyway.
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I'm a pretty extreme extrovert. Social distancing and staying at home is pretty much just another day for me.
When talk others use right words good. You no extrovert.
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lol I was on very little sleep yesterday when I typed that. It wasn't my only typo either. "Despite" v.s." Depise." Funny thing is I previewed a few times too.
Re:Not going well (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah... my motivation is shot when working from home exclusively; I am supposed to go into the office for a week every few months... and I need to in order to kind of “take stock” of what is going on. Unfortunately that would be this week, so not going to happen.
My tips: do not watch television news programs, limit other news sources to less than one hour per day, do not look at the stock market for more than 2 minutes per day, and define a “20%” project with measurable goals and progress tracking.
One of my biggest challenges now is that eating lunch out was one of my big “rewards” for the day, but all the restaurants are closed. That and waiting in lines for toilet paper... /s
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Ethernet and keep own part of the ISP bandwidth for work day..
Get ready for work as usual and work as normal for the shift.
useless (Score:2)
Most people have to be online when and how their employer makes them.
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depends if you lose your job because of their shitty reliability or not.
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I normally work from home, have Xfinity, and have not had any significant issues previously or currently.
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I have xfinity too. They have had reliability problems over the past decade at two locations. Once a week an outage for 5 to 20 minutes on average. Most recently they wasted time for days resetting and farting around with my router, and finally I drove half an hour to bring it in for exchange; that's me wasting my time for their shitty gear. Now fortunately the modem is working but box driving the TV has had all lights blinking for days and needs replaced; since we don't watch much TV and mainly have t
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Same here (Score:3)
"I worried about missing human interaction -- not just talking to people in the office and hallways, but going out to lunch etc. It turns out I never really missed it."
Same here, I could work at home indefinitely and I could die happy if I never saw another cube farm or open floor plan again.
Okay, maybe I'd go in once a year, but more than that would be excessive.
Tip #0 (Score:5, Insightful)
Linus forgot his most important tip: When working remotely, it's hard to convey emotions through text-based messages. So you have to be sure to compose the most imaginative insults and use the most colorful language possible to get your point across when your colleagues are not meeting your expectations.
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I think Linus was(is) abrasive because he does not tolerate mediocrity well and really does not have to bow down to anyone.
This was the joke. Linus was infamously bad to work with. We wasn't abrasive, he was a god damn meat slicer, and just because you disagree with someone doesn't mean you tear them up with colourful language in front of all to see. It led to plenty of qualified people just no longer being interested in working with him which is precisely why he has toned it down, a self reflection that a lot of the worst managers in the world could learn from.
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Just use the middle finger emoticon like a proper professional, no need to resort to colourful language when telling someone they're a fucking moron :-)
Another tip: sequestered working area (Score:5, Insightful)
I've tried to do work in a 'home office' that's within reach of a common area - that doesn't work: if they can see you, you're "home and available" for whatever- a quick errand, a quick question, whatever can be distracting to your work.
It's best if you pick an area of low travel, and if you have kids, preferably one that they've never seen or are allowed to go into, like a basement, or workshop, or shed, or whatever can accomplish that.
Again, if you're within easy reach, you might as well be working from the kitchen table.
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Re: Another tip: sequestered working area (Score:3)
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Pro and con of home office (Score:2)
no disinfectant present at the entrance, so I really have to think of washing my hands after having been out
suddenly I am expected to do catering chores..?!
I find myself having to do IT support for employees of totally different companies, whereas at my office I'm not in IT at all, there's other people for that
crap coffee machine
there's under age people walking in at all hours, requesting help with school work such as mathematics and French, and for printouts
Pro:
Printer works better than at the
Bucket, soap, water (Score:2)
A bucket of strong decon solution at the entrance lets you clean up before touching the door, and you do not need to rinse off soapy water with clean water as more soapy and water will do.
If you wear gloves (going about bare handed is silly if you can get nitrile work gloves) you can decon the gloves with very strong solutions before entering your dwelling. That's little different than when I wear them to work with solvents.
If needed I'll carry a can of carb cleaner (toluene) for swift (outdoor) self glove
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I value my job (Score:1)
And donâ(TM)t want to get fired for harassment. Jackass Trovalds.
Can we have a real RDP-like solution for Linux? (Score:3)
Maybe this will motivate Linus to give some thought to giving Linux proper modern remote framebuffer support that works as well for Linux as RDP does for Windows.
VNC is the most contextually-clueless way to do remote video. It literally just shovels raw bitmaps over the wire, and lacks even support for things like BitBlt() (other than to the extent that you could conceivably approximate it by compressing the current frame's bitmap against the previous frame's bitmap).
In theory, Linux had support for remote framebuffers (via remote X) long before Windows did... but remote X has basically stagnated for years, and never really evolved into something that can efficiently handle 24-bit (or 32-bit) alpha-blended desktops with dropshadows and composing window managers, let alone videogames. From what I've read, remote X *today* has basically just turned into a wrapper around VNC, because most of what made remote X different has either been disabled due to security concerns or completely outstripped by the demands of modern alpha-blended composing window managers & desktop environments.
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Wow, that's FANTASTIC! I'll have to try it out. It looks like it's not quite up to handling full-blown KDE or Gnome in all its drop-shadowed compositing glory, but they're apparently making active progress towards working on it as a goal.
I vaguely remember becoming aware of NX a couple of years ago, but I think that at the time, it was an enterprise-priced commercial product with "call us" pricing (which inevitably means, "Don't bother, you can't afford it").
Home office should be a norm (Score:1)