A lot of people trying to defend being a jerk as necessary in these circumstances. I think Google culture proves the opposite: Googley code and peer reviews, blameless postmortems, and a host of other mechanisms that de-escalate and de-personalize things.
The Meltdown work at Google probably didn't begin with a rant about morons.
It's possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and criticize others without inducing flame wars. It only works for Linus because people won't go nuclear in the response, but for rank and file engineers, especially of equal stature, if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.
I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. It's is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a problem, or reaching agreement faster.
The Meltdown work at Google probably didn't begin with a rant about morons.
It's possible to construct a culture where people can air grievances and criticize others without inducing flame wars. It only works for Linus because people won't go nuclear in the response, but for rank and file engineers, especially of equal stature, if you call someone a moron in a thread, it's likely to kill productivity and create a negative testosterone ladden atmosphere of people trying to avoid being wrong, and counter attacking others.
I've worked at a lot of places where engineer got into heated shouting matches. It's is not a way to increase the probability of zeroing in on a problem, or reaching agreement faster.