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Brilliant jerks almost always have a net negative impact on a project when you factor in their adverse effects on their teammates. The existence of a competing

Brilliant jerks almost always have a net negative impact on a project when you factor in their adverse effects on their teammates. The existence of a competing fork might be healthy, though. Having competition can make your priorities a lot clearer.

rjzzleep 4y ago
You mean like Linus or countless others did with Linux eh and a bunch of other world class open source projects? This is the lie people like you keep purporting in those VC money firehoses that have no grounds in the real world.
- mort96 4y ago
  Well, Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it, and is now a completely different person in mailing lists. But note that your parent comment said "almost always", not "always". The Linux project isn't exactly typical.
  - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
    > Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it He really did not. He simply aged and had kids. With age everything looks "not important enough to be upset by" Believe me.
    - mort96 4y ago
      I don't think that's giving him enough credit. There was a very marked moment where he wrote to mailing lists about how he realized it was a problem and took some time away from the keyboard to work on himself. I don't know what to google for to find the e-mails now, but it was very clearly intentional.
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        He was already almost 50. I'm giving him a lot of credit for doing it, that proves he wasn't an abusive person, he just was himself. It's the World around him that changed and he adapted. A lot of people do not adapt and think that their sensibilities are other people's problems.
    - gilrain 4y ago
      > He really did not. Why would I believe your guess instead of his actual statement?
      - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
        because he actually did nothing about it until he was fully involved. i.e. until he was ~50 years old, when he stepped aside his words (Sun, 16 Sep 2018): This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. [...] I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately. Which is the same things Stallman said after they tried to push him out. Linus is just smarter than Stallman, was preoccupied at the time that Linux development was being taken over, and released a public statement that made people happy, bu also he haven't changed much [1], because, in the end, he is who he is and we should appreciate him for what he's achieved. [1] a year later he released this statement people take me seriously in a way they didn't do back in 1994. And that's absolutely not some kind of complaint about how I wasn't taken seriously back then – quite the reverse. It's more me grumbling that people take me much too seriously now, and I can't say silly stupid crap anymore. So I'll still call out people (and particularly companies) for doing dumb things, but now I have to do it knowing that it's news, and me giving some company the finger will be remembered for a decade afterwards. Whether deserved or not, it might not be worth it. He realized that people were trojan horsing his words against Linux. But he's Linus Torvalds, he's in the unfortunate position of being the face and image of the most successful OSS project ever, not some guy on a mailing list about Thunderbird, that nobody cares of.
        dingdong123 4y ago
        All this politewashing is extremely tiring
  - throwoutway 4y ago
    > Well, Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it, and is now a completely different person in mailing lists. Sure, but as another counterpoint to OP, that was after two decades of producing value (not just Linux but also Git).
- Tepix 4y ago
  Linux is doing well. We don't know how what would have happened if Linus hadn't frozen out several kernel contributors before working on himself. I've seen the effect of a brilliant jerk first hand. People leave. I'm sure it's often a net negative. Btw, calling this discussion a "lie" comes across as overly aggressive.
  - FeepingCreature 4y ago
    I'm not sure it's that simple. Consider a situation where only one of two people A and B can stay; but if A causes B to leave it's obvious (because A is rude), and if B causes A to leave it's non-obvious (because B writes bad code and lowered the project standard enough to torpedo A's enthusiasm). In that situation, if iterated, it would look like 1. jerks clearly cause people to leave, but 2. projects get worse over time for no reason anyone can clearly identify. Identifying that you are in situation 2 would be difficult, in part because you'd kicked out everyone rude enough to point fingers at B. I don't know how to solve that, if it's real.
    - runlevel1 4y ago
      That would be a failure in leadership. Two people conflicting doesn't necessarily mean either are toxic. If a legitimate complaint falls on deaf ears, even people who aren't toxic can become rude in their frustration. It could be a legitimate problem with the underperforming person (that may or may not be fixable), an overreaction to a perceived problem, an interpersonal conflict between two people, a toxic employee, or some combination of the the above. If you have a toxic person and an underperformer dragging the team morale down, you have two problems that need to be fixed. A good leader will dig deeper to try to understand what's really going on and act accordingly. In the scenario you've described, digging deeper would mean having the person making the claim present concrete examples and soliciting outside opinions if folks on the team are unwilling to give theirs. In my experience, things usually fall apart due to a failure to act rather than acting on false positives.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    I think "brilliant jerk" is lacking in nuance. From what I've seen much of the time Linus really isn't that bad, and never was. He did (does?) have his "moments" where he rails against people who he feels should know better, which are often excessive and unproductive. I don't wish to excuse this, but but this is very different from someone who is a jerk 100% of the time, rails against "noobs" constantly, and things like that. In the end, details like this matter a great deal.
asdajksah2123 4y ago
The Vim/Neovim is a great natural experiment on this. Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it. And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim users who take the time to think about their editors, customize them, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  Bram has his sometimes idiosyncratic ways of doing things, but that's quite a different thing than being "not nice". It's a completely different situation with very different dynamics. > I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years. That would be highly disruptive as Neovim isn't compatible with Vim. Plus Vim is still actively developed with no signs of slowing down.
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  To be fair, people who spend a lot of time customising vim (eg embedding a terminal, building half an IDE) seems to be very much the target market for neovim. I use regular vim because I don't want to think about my editor, I just want it to work.
- brynjolf 4y ago
  Brad is nice, don't try to soil his reputation because you disagree with him on the features he wants to bring into VIM

rjzzleep 4y ago

You mean like Linus or countless others did with Linux eh and a bunch of other world class open source projects? This is the lie people like you keep purporting in those VC money firehoses that have no grounds in the real world.

mort96 4y ago
Well, Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it, and is now a completely different person in mailing lists. But note that your parent comment said "almost always", not "always". The Linux project isn't exactly typical.
- peoplefromibiza 4y ago
  > Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it He really did not. He simply aged and had kids. With age everything looks "not important enough to be upset by" Believe me.
  - mort96 4y ago
    I don't think that's giving him enough credit. There was a very marked moment where he wrote to mailing lists about how he realized it was a problem and took some time away from the keyboard to work on himself. I don't know what to google for to find the e-mails now, but it was very clearly intentional.
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      He was already almost 50. I'm giving him a lot of credit for doing it, that proves he wasn't an abusive person, he just was himself. It's the World around him that changed and he adapted. A lot of people do not adapt and think that their sensibilities are other people's problems.
  - gilrain 4y ago
    > He really did not. Why would I believe your guess instead of his actual statement?
    - peoplefromibiza 4y ago
      because he actually did nothing about it until he was fully involved. i.e. until he was ~50 years old, when he stepped aside his words (Sun, 16 Sep 2018): This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good. [...] I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people’s emotions and respond appropriately. Which is the same things Stallman said after they tried to push him out. Linus is just smarter than Stallman, was preoccupied at the time that Linux development was being taken over, and released a public statement that made people happy, bu also he haven't changed much [1], because, in the end, he is who he is and we should appreciate him for what he's achieved. [1] a year later he released this statement people take me seriously in a way they didn't do back in 1994. And that's absolutely not some kind of complaint about how I wasn't taken seriously back then – quite the reverse. It's more me grumbling that people take me much too seriously now, and I can't say silly stupid crap anymore. So I'll still call out people (and particularly companies) for doing dumb things, but now I have to do it knowing that it's news, and me giving some company the finger will be remembered for a decade afterwards. Whether deserved or not, it might not be worth it. He realized that people were trojan horsing his words against Linux. But he's Linus Torvalds, he's in the unfortunate position of being the face and image of the most successful OSS project ever, not some guy on a mailing list about Thunderbird, that nobody cares of.
      - dingdong123 4y ago
        All this politewashing is extremely tiring
- throwoutway 4y ago
  > Well, Linus himself did think that his behavior was a big enough issue that he took serious steps to do something about it, and is now a completely different person in mailing lists. Sure, but as another counterpoint to OP, that was after two decades of producing value (not just Linux but also Git).
Tepix 4y ago
Linux is doing well. We don't know how what would have happened if Linus hadn't frozen out several kernel contributors before working on himself. I've seen the effect of a brilliant jerk first hand. People leave. I'm sure it's often a net negative. Btw, calling this discussion a "lie" comes across as overly aggressive.
- FeepingCreature 4y ago
  I'm not sure it's that simple. Consider a situation where only one of two people A and B can stay; but if A causes B to leave it's obvious (because A is rude), and if B causes A to leave it's non-obvious (because B writes bad code and lowered the project standard enough to torpedo A's enthusiasm). In that situation, if iterated, it would look like 1. jerks clearly cause people to leave, but 2. projects get worse over time for no reason anyone can clearly identify. Identifying that you are in situation 2 would be difficult, in part because you'd kicked out everyone rude enough to point fingers at B. I don't know how to solve that, if it's real.
  - runlevel1 4y ago
    That would be a failure in leadership. Two people conflicting doesn't necessarily mean either are toxic. If a legitimate complaint falls on deaf ears, even people who aren't toxic can become rude in their frustration. It could be a legitimate problem with the underperforming person (that may or may not be fixable), an overreaction to a perceived problem, an interpersonal conflict between two people, a toxic employee, or some combination of the the above. If you have a toxic person and an underperformer dragging the team morale down, you have two problems that need to be fixed. A good leader will dig deeper to try to understand what's really going on and act accordingly. In the scenario you've described, digging deeper would mean having the person making the claim present concrete examples and soliciting outside opinions if folks on the team are unwilling to give theirs. In my experience, things usually fall apart due to a failure to act rather than acting on false positives.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  I think "brilliant jerk" is lacking in nuance. From what I've seen much of the time Linus really isn't that bad, and never was. He did (does?) have his "moments" where he rails against people who he feels should know better, which are often excessive and unproductive. I don't wish to excuse this, but but this is very different from someone who is a jerk 100% of the time, rails against "noobs" constantly, and things like that. In the end, details like this matter a great deal.

asdajksah2123 4y ago

The Vim/Neovim is a great natural experiment on this. Vim is a highly successful project for decades. And one could correctly attribute much of that success to Bram Moolenaar's driving it. And yet, once Neovim was created with a much "nicer" and broader leadership team, innovation has absolutely skyrocketed, where it's highly likely that Neovim has almost completely replaced Vim as the preferred editor for most Vim users who take the time to think about their editors, customize them, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years.

Beltalowda 4y ago
Bram has his sometimes idiosyncratic ways of doing things, but that's quite a different thing than being "not nice". It's a completely different situation with very different dynamics. > I wouldn't be surprised if neovim starts replacing vim in distributions within a couple of years. That would be highly disruptive as Neovim isn't compatible with Vim. Plus Vim is still actively developed with no signs of slowing down.
qu4z-2 4y ago
To be fair, people who spend a lot of time customising vim (eg embedding a terminal, building half an IDE) seems to be very much the target market for neovim. I use regular vim because I don't want to think about my editor, I just want it to work.
brynjolf 4y ago
Brad is nice, don't try to soil his reputation because you disagree with him on the features he wants to bring into VIM