[TUHS] End of an era: the last ATC (USENIX Annual Technical Conference)

[Larry McVoy]

On Sun, Jul 20, 2025 at 02:59:08AM -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote:
> At 2025-07-19T20:16:33-0500, Will Senn wrote:
> > I've thought about the "if you worked for me", dig and it kind of
> > stung.
> 
> Manure often does.
> 
> Larry came up in the soil from which grew tech bro culture.
> 
> A preoccupation with managing the preferences of others, as with Steve
> Jobs's "thought leadership", is consistent with the authoritarian style
> he advocates.

Huh, you won't be surprised I have a different perspective.  Allow me
to tell you how I describe managing engineers.  Suppose we were artists,
there were 4 of us.  Someone brought us a photograph and said "I want
a painting of that".  OK, split it into quarters and go do it.  What
do we get back?

Well, artist #1 likes oil paints so that's what s/he did.
Artist #2 likes charcoal so that's what they did.
Artist #3 likes pen and ink.
Artist #4 likes water color.

Is that a painting?  Maybe if you like a mish mash of stuff that doesn't
go together.  Most people would call it garbage and refuse to pay.

My so called "authoritarian style" is nothing more than I was the leader,
I had to pick one style.  And, yes, it means if you have N people working
you usually have N-1 pissed off people because they weren't getting to do
things their way.  Letting them do things their way means there is no
overall picture you are driving towards.

And I'm not above being overridden.  I personally hate GNU make for all
the similar reasons you are advocating for a smaller vi.  But my team
convinced me it was less work to move to that than maintain all the
scripts we were using to use a simple make.

But yeah, when people work for me, I lead.  I set the tone.  It wasn't
tech bro nonsense, it was about herding people towards the same picture.

I wasn't trying to tell Will he can't use whatever editor he wants, I was
trying to tell Will I wouldn't tolerate this much back and forth about his
personal preferences distracting us from shipping product.  My team had
emacs people and vi people, nobody cared so long as you got your job done.

What we didn't have is editor arguments clogging up our thinking.