> minimum avoid pissing everyone else off

Which also, at times, means appeasing people even when you are confident that they are wrong because you need their cooperation in the future. In a large complicated system, being able to work together is often more important to the system's reliability, performance, etc. than being as right as possible.

Plus even when you're confident you are in the right you might still be in the wrong. After all, the people you are disagreeing with are also superbly competent and they believe they're in the right just as you do. There can be hills worth dying on, but they ought to be very rare.

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motorest 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Which also, at times, means appeasing people even when you are confident that they are wrong because you need their cooperation in the future.

Being unwilling to follow basic QA processes in preparation of a release candidate, and then doubling down by attacking the release engineer with claims the QA process doesn't apply to you because you know better, is something that is far more serious than lacking basic soft skills. It's a fireable offense in most companies.

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nullc 3 days ago | parent [-]

> It's a fireable offense in most companies.

In a company there are other employees who have your success as part of their job function. People to train you, to talk you down off a ledge, people to step in and guard you against misunderstanding or criticisms. People to advocate for you or send you home before a dispute crosses a point of no return. You're also paid to be there, to put up with the companies BS, .. the project isn't yours, it's not usually your reputation that's hurt when the company wants to make a decision you don't agree with and it goes poorly.

The context is so different, I don't think it's really comparable.

	▲	motorest 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> In a company there are other employees who have your success as part of their job function. Yes, and they enforce basic relase processes to ensure you don't break releases by skipping QA processes or introducing untested and unverified features in release candidates. And you sure as hell don't have primadonna developers stay in the payroll for long if they start throwing tantrums and personal attacks towards fellow engineers when they are asked to follow the release process or are called out for trying to sneak untested changes in mission-critical components.

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mort96 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Exactly. An extremely important part of working in some hierarchical organizational structure, be that as a Linux kernel developer or as an employee at a company, is the ability to disagree with a superior's decision yet acquiesce and go along with it. Good organizations leave room for disagreement, but there always comes a point where someone in a leadership position has made a final decision and the time for debate is over.