Be aggressive, Being Nice all the time is Not Nice

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Be aggressive, Being Nice all the time is Not Nice

  • From the article “Harsh Truths for Success from Linus Torvalds”

In some companies, being nice is important because when they evaluate the bonus you will take at the end of the year, one of the biggest metrics is your character. In fact, if human resources fires people, one of the biggest metrics along with the performance is the behavior. We’re forcing people to be nice. Otherwise, we eliminate them.

Part of the reason this is done is, we don’t want to hear harsh truths. We want to hear them like it’s not our fault even if it is. However, that is not the right thing. Of course in some areas, being nice is required. For instance, if you’re caring for an elder person, being nice should be a requirement. However, does it apply to the technology industry?

Several researchers tried this theory: They created two control groups of random people. One group was forced to be friendly and kind while the other one is free to defend their ideas more aggressively. The same problem was given to these two groups and the results were evaluated. After lots of repetitions, they found that the aggressive group found better ideas and solutions over and over. Technological improvement focuses on the same thing: finding the best solution to problems. Hence, I think we should be able to defend our ideas against each other until we find the best solution by using mathematical proofs or making experiments.

At this point, I want to clarify something: Defending aggressively doesn’t mean defending your idea to death even if you’re wrong. If you’re wrong and there is proof or a logical explanation, you should accept that and let other people improve your wisdom. You should be reasonable while defending your ideas.

Torvalds did the same thing in Linux. In the commits, and the media he defended his ideas in a very aggressive way. Along the way, he broke hearts too. However, this was a good strategy to find the best solution. Thanks to this approach, Linux became something different. While macOS is working on specific hardware and Windows is giving lots of blue screens with memory leaks and inefficient implementations, Linux works on all devices by requiring a little professional touch and is optimized in a great way that the call trace of the kernel is far better than Windows.

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