7 ms·

The same way you build talent in any other organization - give people money, tell them this is their job, and put them in the same "room" as people who also hav

The same way you build talent in any other organization - give people money, tell them this is their job, and put them in the same "room" as people who also have this job but have been doing it longer. Or are you asking how we create more people who will do this in their free time?

voakbasda 5y ago
These people already exist. They do not need to be manufactured. I think many get turned away from the Linux community for non-technical reasons. For some, the community takes a bigger personal toll than the technical challenges. I personally gave up over that aspect and stopped contributing. I did not feel welcome or needed.
- eyegor 5y ago
  I have tried to contribute to the Linux kernel development in the past, but I found it to be a strong inner circle of seasoned devs. The fact that they were still using mailing lists instead of github/gitlab/etc to keep track of development was painful enough, but they were also hostile to asking for documentation on inner modules. I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off.
  - lproven 5y ago
    I don't have anything to add to your overall point – I'm sure you're right. I just wanted to address two smaller ones: > The fact that they were still using mailing lists In my personal experience, going back some 30 years or so online with my own personal paid email account – which is still live and still works – I find that most people I've worked or interacted with who dislike using email for workflow or other important comms do not know how to use email effectively. Strange as it may seem, this now applies to the developers of most email clients and online email services. Email and mailing lists are remarkably powerful and capable tools, if used properly. Most people do not use it or them properly. I have yet to see anything else by anyone that is an improvement in every way on email. > I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off. TBPH, as a Linux user and professional, I rather hope it does not. Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. At the rate things are going it looks quite likely that our technological civilization will collapse due to out-of-control global warming and the ongoing and accelerating mass extinction event. As the parent of a 2YO I very much hope I am wrong. But if I am and it doesn't, the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. Linux, perhaps, but "the model"? I'm not so sure. > It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. That's what they said about SQL RDBMSes too. > There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. Maybe for good reason. > the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. That's what they... Eh, I'm repeating myself. > If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. That's probably what they... No, not quite. But it may have been what Linus thought -- at least, judging from what he made. > If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all. I doubt that'll happen. I'll be happy if they become the mid-21st-century SQL -- which I suppose will also be still going strong.
      - lproven 5y ago
        I know it's an unpopular view. :-) But the alternatives are there. The fast-headers thing put me in mind of the way that Plan 9 changed the C language, not only formalising indentation and things, but to forbid nested #includes, which apparently vastly reduced compilation times. Inferno moved on to largely supplant C with Limbo, which is one of the ancestors of Go. I'd say Go, D and Rust all show that there's demand for a newer, better C and that C++ is not it. Apple's xnu is widely held not to be a true microkernel because of its big in-kernel Unix server, but Minix 3 is... and for all that Minix 3 is not quite there yet, QNX shows this is possible and doable and performant. It's 2022. We have boxes with terabytes of RAM now and hardware-assisted virtualisation even on £5 ARM boards. We don't need a total clean-sweep replacement; we can virtualise the old stuff and slot in underneath something smaller, simpler and cleaner that mere mortals can understand in less than a lifetime. 3D Xpoint memory is on the market now and makes non-volatile RAM doable, multiple orders of magnitude faster and longer-lasting than flash memory. Computers don't even need drives any more: we could just have a few terabytes of persistent memory, and no more shuffling stuff into memory. True single-level store is doable now. Who needs files when everything is in RAM forever? ISTM that much of the computer industry has its eyes on the ground now, and is just shuffling round and round in the same old groove, rather than trying new stuff. In the middle of my working life there were dozens of exciting new OSes trying to do things differently. Now, we have 30 million lines of C instead, and need a billion-dollar industry to aim all those many eyes at all those many bugs. As Molnár himself said: “Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away."
pclmulqdq 5y ago
You create a lot of unimpressive people by doing that too. You need someone to have passion for a project like this to do a huge rewrite. It's pretty clear that passion can't come from money.
- stathibus 5y ago
  This is obviously false, the world is full of people who are passionate about what they get paid to do.
  - Spivak 5y ago
    Yeah, and for “professionals” it’s pretty rare to find someone that doesn’t at least like the field they chose, spent 4+ years of university on, and applied for jobs in. It’s vanishingly rare to find someone exceptionally talented in a field they hate because of the practice it takes to get to that level.
    - nik282000 5y ago
      >It’s vanishingly rare to find someone exceptionally talented in a field they hate because of the practice it takes to get to that level. So what do I win?
      - saurik 5y ago
        I mean, the prize is really bad :(.
  - pclmulqdq 5y ago
    The world is also full of people who are not passionate about what they get paid to do, and they do it because it is high-paying and offers security.
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I would say the world is full of people who are passionate about getting paid, which makes best course of action to be not doing a thing while convincing others you do, which IMO is harmful.
IgorPartola 5y ago
I think the question is more how to find/create more people who would spend a good chunk of their productivity on what sounds like a massively boring rewrite that has marginal returns on investment (Moore’s law says that 50-80% gains will be made up in less than a year by hardware getting faster, and even if it has slowed down it isn’t completely out of the picture). That does take a special kind of person to see this as an ambitious project and not a boring one.
- fouc 5y ago
  I find it hard to see how any developer would describe it as "massively boring". At a basic level, every time a coder solves a problem, there's a dopamine hit. The greater the familiarity with the material, the easier it is to solve problems. Anyone that spends a sufficient amount of time in a niche will develop that familiarity.
  - denton-scratch 5y ago
    Refactoring can be satisfying; but spending two years refactoring kernel headers for a gain in build performance but not in runtime performance, is objectively "massively boring". I've attempted something similar myself - a refactoring of a very dirty Java project that was orders of magnitude smaller than the Linux kernel. I didn't have good refactoring tools, nor even a good SCCS; my month-long effort had to be backed-out. I didn't enjoy it - it was boring, but needed doing, because the accumulating cruft was impacting my ability to work on the codebase (and presumably everyone else's). The project stayed dirty, and my reputation suffered. Credit to Ingo for his perseverance. That is massive commitment.
    - whizzter 5y ago
      Big turds often leaves refactors almost equal to Joels "V2 rewrites", continuous runnable general cleanups is often the first step (and yields surprising benefits in general) then still runnable prep refactors that makes the bigger leaps smaller (temporarily increasing complexity so you really want them in just before embarking on the bigger stuff so it doesn't increase complexity in itself). That said, in your case it felt a bit like an organizational failure also. As you could read in Ingo's mail he had to start over after plenty of work put in, for him there wasn't any reputation damage because he seems to have had free reign to start this as he wished.
baybal2 5y ago
Ingo wasn't working at Linux full time at the time of his peak. He was indeed a Jedi master level C programmer even before he started working at Linux kernel seriously.
dijonman2 5y ago
The people who are the most capable are typically the ones who do it for fun, not money.
- sdevonoes 5y ago
  People who does stuff for fun usually have all their money problems already resolved. Health problems -> Money problems -> Fun problems. You get the privilege to work on "fun problems" once you don't have "money" or "health" problems (otherwise, the "fun" problems are the least of your "problems").
  - dijonman2 5y ago
    I got my start in software many years ago because I had passion. Now days the market is flooded with people who want to get paid. I had free time, and an interest. Often the same characteristics of people who contribute to FOSS.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    I don’t think that’s true. A lot of the people who have had the greatest impact on the world were never financially rewarded for it. Many aren’t even recognised for their work.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      This thread seems to be going down the path of rediscoving Maslows hierarchy of needs.
    - cmeacham98 5y ago
      It's not that they are directly compensated for their work, it's that the money problem is solved, even if from an external source. Linus Torvalds worked on Linux for a long time before being directly compensated for it, but he probably would never have done so had he needed to worry about whether he could afford his next meal and rent that month.
phendrenad2 5y ago
It's not about talent, it's about clout. Not just anyone could show up and do this.

voakbasda 5y ago

These people already exist. They do not need to be manufactured. I think many get turned away from the Linux community for non-technical reasons. For some, the community takes a bigger personal toll than the technical challenges. I personally gave up over that aspect and stopped contributing. I did not feel welcome or needed.

eyegor 5y ago
I have tried to contribute to the Linux kernel development in the past, but I found it to be a strong inner circle of seasoned devs. The fact that they were still using mailing lists instead of github/gitlab/etc to keep track of development was painful enough, but they were also hostile to asking for documentation on inner modules. I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off.
- lproven 5y ago
  I don't have anything to add to your overall point – I'm sure you're right. I just wanted to address two smaller ones: > The fact that they were still using mailing lists In my personal experience, going back some 30 years or so online with my own personal paid email account – which is still live and still works – I find that most people I've worked or interacted with who dislike using email for workflow or other important comms do not know how to use email effectively. Strange as it may seem, this now applies to the developers of most email clients and online email services. Email and mailing lists are remarkably powerful and capable tools, if used properly. Most people do not use it or them properly. I have yet to see anything else by anyone that is an improvement in every way on email. > I'm not sure how it will progress when they retire or die off. TBPH, as a Linux user and professional, I rather hope it does not. Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. At the rate things are going it looks quite likely that our technological civilization will collapse due to out-of-control global warming and the ongoing and accelerating mass extinction event. As the parent of a 2YO I very much hope I am wrong. But if I am and it doesn't, the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all.
  - CRConrad 5y ago
    > Linux is an amazingly useful tool, but OTOH it's now, in and of itself, a vast hairball of technical debt. The traditional UNIX model itself is. Linux, perhaps, but "the model"? I'm not so sure. > It is long past time that we should have moved past it on to better things. That's what they said about SQL RDBMSes too. > There have been many attempts but none have ever achieved critical mass. Maybe for good reason. > the world needs better tech, and a ½ century old UNIX clone already does not really cut it today. That's what they... Eh, I'm repeating myself. > If Linux and all the other monolithic Unixes die when their dev teams die, we'll have to move on to newer, smaller, simpler systems that a new generation of programmers can actually read from top to bottom, understand, and do useful work on. That's probably what they... No, not quite. But it may have been what Linus thought -- at least, judging from what he made. > If monolithic Unices become the mid-21st-century COBOL, just kept around for a few old systems and only critical bugs patched, that will be a big win for us all. I doubt that'll happen. I'll be happy if they become the mid-21st-century SQL -- which I suppose will also be still going strong.
    - lproven 5y ago
      I know it's an unpopular view. :-) But the alternatives are there. The fast-headers thing put me in mind of the way that Plan 9 changed the C language, not only formalising indentation and things, but to forbid nested #includes, which apparently vastly reduced compilation times. Inferno moved on to largely supplant C with Limbo, which is one of the ancestors of Go. I'd say Go, D and Rust all show that there's demand for a newer, better C and that C++ is not it. Apple's xnu is widely held not to be a true microkernel because of its big in-kernel Unix server, but Minix 3 is... and for all that Minix 3 is not quite there yet, QNX shows this is possible and doable and performant. It's 2022. We have boxes with terabytes of RAM now and hardware-assisted virtualisation even on £5 ARM boards. We don't need a total clean-sweep replacement; we can virtualise the old stuff and slot in underneath something smaller, simpler and cleaner that mere mortals can understand in less than a lifetime. 3D Xpoint memory is on the market now and makes non-volatile RAM doable, multiple orders of magnitude faster and longer-lasting than flash memory. Computers don't even need drives any more: we could just have a few terabytes of persistent memory, and no more shuffling stuff into memory. True single-level store is doable now. Who needs files when everything is in RAM forever? ISTM that much of the computer industry has its eyes on the ground now, and is just shuffling round and round in the same old groove, rather than trying new stuff. In the middle of my working life there were dozens of exciting new OSes trying to do things differently. Now, we have 30 million lines of C instead, and need a billion-dollar industry to aim all those many eyes at all those many bugs. As Molnár himself said: “Don't forget that Linux became only possible because 20 years of OS research was carefully studied, analyzed, discussed and thrown away."

pclmulqdq 5y ago

You create a lot of unimpressive people by doing that too. You need someone to have passion for a project like this to do a huge rewrite. It's pretty clear that passion can't come from money.

stathibus 5y ago
This is obviously false, the world is full of people who are passionate about what they get paid to do.
- Spivak 5y ago
  Yeah, and for “professionals” it’s pretty rare to find someone that doesn’t at least like the field they chose, spent 4+ years of university on, and applied for jobs in. It’s vanishingly rare to find someone exceptionally talented in a field they hate because of the practice it takes to get to that level.
  - nik282000 5y ago
    >It’s vanishingly rare to find someone exceptionally talented in a field they hate because of the practice it takes to get to that level. So what do I win?
    - saurik 5y ago
      I mean, the prize is really bad :(.
- pclmulqdq 5y ago
  The world is also full of people who are not passionate about what they get paid to do, and they do it because it is high-paying and offers security.
- numpad0 5y ago
  I would say the world is full of people who are passionate about getting paid, which makes best course of action to be not doing a thing while convincing others you do, which IMO is harmful.

IgorPartola 5y ago

I think the question is more how to find/create more people who would spend a good chunk of their productivity on what sounds like a massively boring rewrite that has marginal returns on investment (Moore’s law says that 50-80% gains will be made up in less than a year by hardware getting faster, and even if it has slowed down it isn’t completely out of the picture). That does take a special kind of person to see this as an ambitious project and not a boring one.

fouc 5y ago
I find it hard to see how any developer would describe it as "massively boring". At a basic level, every time a coder solves a problem, there's a dopamine hit. The greater the familiarity with the material, the easier it is to solve problems. Anyone that spends a sufficient amount of time in a niche will develop that familiarity.
- denton-scratch 5y ago
  Refactoring can be satisfying; but spending two years refactoring kernel headers for a gain in build performance but not in runtime performance, is objectively "massively boring". I've attempted something similar myself - a refactoring of a very dirty Java project that was orders of magnitude smaller than the Linux kernel. I didn't have good refactoring tools, nor even a good SCCS; my month-long effort had to be backed-out. I didn't enjoy it - it was boring, but needed doing, because the accumulating cruft was impacting my ability to work on the codebase (and presumably everyone else's). The project stayed dirty, and my reputation suffered. Credit to Ingo for his perseverance. That is massive commitment.
  - whizzter 5y ago
    Big turds often leaves refactors almost equal to Joels "V2 rewrites", continuous runnable general cleanups is often the first step (and yields surprising benefits in general) then still runnable prep refactors that makes the bigger leaps smaller (temporarily increasing complexity so you really want them in just before embarking on the bigger stuff so it doesn't increase complexity in itself). That said, in your case it felt a bit like an organizational failure also. As you could read in Ingo's mail he had to start over after plenty of work put in, for him there wasn't any reputation damage because he seems to have had free reign to start this as he wished.

baybal2 5y ago

Ingo wasn't working at Linux full time at the time of his peak. He was indeed a Jedi master level C programmer even before he started working at Linux kernel seriously.

dijonman2 5y ago

The people who are the most capable are typically the ones who do it for fun, not money.

sdevonoes 5y ago
People who does stuff for fun usually have all their money problems already resolved. Health problems -> Money problems -> Fun problems. You get the privilege to work on "fun problems" once you don't have "money" or "health" problems (otherwise, the "fun" problems are the least of your "problems").
- dijonman2 5y ago
  I got my start in software many years ago because I had passion. Now days the market is flooded with people who want to get paid. I had free time, and an interest. Often the same characteristics of people who contribute to FOSS.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  I don’t think that’s true. A lot of the people who have had the greatest impact on the world were never financially rewarded for it. Many aren’t even recognised for their work.
  - xxpor 5y ago
    This thread seems to be going down the path of rediscoving Maslows hierarchy of needs.
  - cmeacham98 5y ago
    It's not that they are directly compensated for their work, it's that the money problem is solved, even if from an external source. Linus Torvalds worked on Linux for a long time before being directly compensated for it, but he probably would never have done so had he needed to worry about whether he could afford his next meal and rent that month.

phendrenad2 5y ago

It's not about talent, it's about clout. Not just anyone could show up and do this.