Whatever his true motivation is, it makes sense from a business standpoint. Microsoft would love to become for Windows what Apple is for OS X / iOS, and Valve doesn't want that - it's understandable. From a certain angle, Steam machines are not unlike Google+: there are some diehard fans that would kill for it, many go like "why do we need another [social network / console platform]?" and the company behind it is big enough and has enough mindshare that the product is guaranteed to have some visibility even if it is not quite on par with what the rest of the market has to offer, and eventually gain enough of a market share to make sense, even with all backwards / forwards support issues you pointed out. And for consumers more competition is always good, so sure why not.

that will automate creating a bunch of fake profiles on facebook, twitter, linkedin and whatnot given some photos. this way facial recognition software will drown in the data noise - which of them is real you? something tells me there will be a demand for this service pretty soon.

just kidding, but only half so.

There is a good example - Russia has a long history of "diagnosing" dissenters with "mild schizophrenia" and similar mental conditions and "sentencing" them to be treated in special prison-like institutions. It started back in tsarist days in 19th century and lasted up until at least the late Soviet period, when a bunch of dissidents were forcefully "treated" from this. (There are also some reports it's been going on in the 90s but lately there have been no high profile cases.)

Parallels can be drawn..

I'll wait for the first service pack before I install this, thanks.

What? That's exactly what the morning standup is for.

But that's exactly the point: too many people were left out early, so they would never accept it as their form of payment. Where it stands today, bitcoin is your run of the mill Ponzi scheme.

So is there an agreement that the choice is between 'professionalism' and, let's call it lack of anger management? Sounds like a false dichotomy to me.

I completely on board with Linus that 'professionalism' today does, in fact, imply many things that are bad for your karma, including office politics, hypocrisy and so on. But at the same time it also implies a couple things which are actually good. In particular, being able to give feedback to other people in such a way that they are not being offended by the form is one of them. Sure, you can always say that people should always welcome feedback in whatever form it takes, but reality is, humans are imperfect and their egos are fragile. If you have talented, motivated people who are adding value to your project, pissing them off without a good reason will simply mean your project wouldn't be as good. The cost of getting some anger management skills in place seems to be a very affordable one to pay, aside from it having an intrinsic value of being a nicer person (which some people may disagree with me on).

And as for the "he's so brilliant and kernel group kicks so much ass they don't really need people with fragile egos in there" argument, I'd draw an analogy with business. Even if you're making great money, AND you still leaving money on the table somewhere, you can improve and should improve. The culture of never stopping to improve begets great things. In the same fashion, if your manners mean someone who could have contributed to your project, did not, it means you did your project a disservice.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/13/

Well, the problem is that people who would make the best interviewers/HR specialists don't want to have that kind of job; they want to get their hands dirty with a real project. It's kinda like tech ops which has a similar problem - they need real engineering skills in that field, but not many real engineers want to work in IT, which is why people with DevOps on their resume are such a hot commodity.

Now, we need someone to figure out DevHR and things will get a LOT better...

This is actually part of the problem, in a way. It's good to be Google and it's good to be in a position like yourself where you can honestly say that yes, we have awesome product and use cutting edge tech. So if the company is NOT committed to tackling interesting problems, and that employees will HAVE to be doing boring routine stuff, guess what's going to happen? Right - that company is still going to market itself as a great-place-to-work to potential candidates. I work in San Francisco; pretty much everyone and their dog is trying to play that card, just like you said - "most of hiring is PR". Guess what - in many cases it's simply not true. Companies are trying to lure engineers in and promise they will be doing fun stuff, but once they're in they are instantly commoditized, randomly shuffled around projects and no one's going to be directly responsible for mismatch between expectations and reality. This is because hiring is done by HR and actual managers don't care that much what said HR promised to these candidates, but sometimes there's just nothing much of interest the company is actually doing, however they do need to get good developers somehow... I've seen plenty of pretty awesome developers quit their companies in disgust after figuring out this bait and switch.

The resulting ecosystem is that even these impressions are not really going be that effective in the long run - I anticipate engineers will figure this out en masse pretty soon. Who cares how good is the company at touting itself if it's not going to follow up on the promises and set expectations? By the end of the day, there's going to be only one good way to hire great people - and that is with genuine, personal recommendations. I am in the gaming industry, so my perception is skewed towards games, but the kind of feedback I get from friends who are most happy with their job is "we have a great team, but our management are idiots". By the end of the day, that's what needs to be fixed, and not the verbiage on the company's Jobs page.

I had the same experience with a recruiter for Google. I mostly have game design and production experience on my resume and since my background is in engineering, those skills listed as "side" skills probably matched his keywords. I didn't realize that at the start of the interview and was wondering why would Google be interested in a game designer. The conversation went on for at least quarter an hour, he was asking me for my experience with different software development platforms and I kept wondering why does that even matter. At a certain point I realized what was going on and said "actually I'm not interested in a software developer position"; his tone immediately changed and he quickly wrapped up the call after that.

I was wondering if my resume looked like an engineer's and went back and looked at it - nope, it didn't, at least not to me. I was getting software developer position offers every once in a while so eventually I added "Please do not contact me for positions in software engineering" to the "contact me for" part on LinkedIn. I still do get these from time to time :)

Manatees don't need any feet, especially not three more...

OK, that makes sense.. sort of. But still falls somewhat short of explaining what is so different about Facebook. After all, the non-tech-savvy people even don't understand the concept of a database, for many it is just "in the internet" somewhere.

On Facebook I chat with people, I use apps, I post things, I click on videos, I use search (very little, but who knows how many people treat their search essentially as a Bing portal). The only difference between this and Google services is in that activities at Google happen in differently designed pages and at different domain names. If that is the whole difference, then the question essentially becomes what is considered a "different context", or in other words to what extent Google needs to visually integrate its services to make sure people understand it's one and the same thing.

I'm all for giving people more control over what is stored in their profile and how to remove it from there, but it doesn't look like this piece of legislation does a good job at it.. looks more like a "you happen to have money and you just made yourself vulnerable" kind of reaction to me.