And yet many projects reach the same equilibrium. Some of the biggest jerks are also the best contributors. And then you can't throw them out without making the project quality suffer.
Is being a jerk strongly correlated with skill of any kind?
Or are the jerky-but-competent driving away some nice-but-competent people?
Is jerkiness strongly correlated with being motivated to contribute to open source? Perhaps for these people, their lack of social skills means their career is somewhat stunted.
Is there something about bad behavior, exhibited by a skilled or high-status person, that is more infective of community values than good behavior? Thus the former tend to dominate, as everybody else adopts the asshole attitude? I've seen this in at least two OSS communities.
1) I think an aggressive personality is common in many successful---not the correct word, but it'll do---people. Look at any "team" sport where one player tends to take the spotlight. With the Tour de France on, I can't help but recall all of the prima donnas of Tours gone by. Actually, it's so rare to have a down-to-earth, genuinely thoughtful and nice person rise to the top in that sport that it's always called out when it happens.
2) I think being a jerk online and lack of in-person social skills aren't correlated. For whatever reason, when it's a computer screen in front of you, people tend to be more aggressive about their point of view. Unchecked, that can turn into "jerkiness," but I don't think it's a one to one. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of people who are jerks online and the same offline. I also know plenty of people who are jerks online and the kind of person you hope passes you on the highway when you've got a flat or run out of gas---it's a given they're stopping and helping in any way they can.
3) I'm a little disturbed by the implication that a stunted career is what motivates people to contribute to open-source software, but I assume it wasn't meant quite that way. This illustrates an interesting point. Given that I don't know the context of where your fourth paragraph is coming from, I'm assuming the best and that you didn't mean it as I took it during my first reading.
That type of small misunderstanding could have resulted in me (or someone else) firing off a quick response calling you out on it, or even less hostilely taking issue with it and trying to rebute it. That in turn could have made you feel more defensive, so your next post might have been preemptively aggressive, and so on. This quickly deteriorates into a cycle where we're making each other more aggressive without meaning to and give rise to this mentality.
Subtly is lost online. It's ashamed, but the way it seems to be.
All that said, I do think those who the community looks up to are the ones that set the tone, for sure. I can point to many a project mailing list that have been rendered useless because some of the biggest (or perceived, historically, or actual) contributors take it over with their overly curt style of responses. :-/
Many of his contemporary obstetricians heard his criticisms of their practices, including his accusations that current obstetric practices amounted to mass murder, said, "seriously, I don’t need to hear that crap," ignored him, and went on murdering their patients by the hundreds of thousands for decades. Carl Levy published a paper on how Semmelweis's theory of infection was implausible. Semmelweis died in an asylum.
When you're giving criticism, it is of course of paramount importance to deliver it in a polite fashion, because most people will disregard the second sentence of this paragraph, and you don't want to be Semmelweis. When you're receiving criticism, it is of paramount importance to entirely ignore whether it is polite or not, because most people will disregard the first sentence of this paragraph, and you don't want to be Levy.
But if you had to be one or the other, it would be much better to be Semmelweis the jerk than Levy the defender of incompetence.
I have a slight suspicion that the problem might be the latter part. The whole web frontend world is balkanized as hell, pretty young and mostly not too demanding. This is often reflected in the community and leads to some heated (and often rather silly) arguments…
Whenever I see posts like this, I have to ask the question: How can code be improved if nobody criticizes it? I can sense the ableist vibe of this blog post, but in general, the ability to say, frankly, that somebody's code is bad is essential for teaching that person how to write good code. I've seen far too many students get away with writing horrible code simply because there isn't a TA on the planet willing to directly point out what's wrong with their algorithms or logic.
In other disciplines, like music (something in which I have quite a bit of experience), criticism is essential. The best teachers I ever had were the ones who were unafraid to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong. One class was taught in a group setting, and the instructor told us at the beginning of class that he usually made people feel uncomfortable, and that thick skins would be required. He had a habit of pointing out what you were doing wrong in the middle of class, not for humiliation, but so that the entire class could learn from example. Best class I've ever taken in that department.
> The best teachers I ever had were the ones who were unafraid to tell me exactly what I was doing wrong.
doesn't contradict with
> But as soon as someone says a software project is “retarded”, unfollow them.
anyway, the teacher should first earn the right to teach. if maradona tells me i am retarded at football, i'll listen. if a random jerk tells that, i'm gonna ask why and say go to hell if i dont like the answer
My issue wasn't with the "retarded" line, actually; I was more concerned by this:
"If someone says something negative about your project in an unreasonable way, don’t take it to heart. There’s something good in every project (it’s open source, it already has one thing going for it), no single project is complete crap, keep the good things and learn from the criticism.
All this boils down to basically 'surround yourself with good people.'"
This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code. There is code which is complete crap and serves only as a warning to others to pay heed, lest they write code just as bad. (Feel free to consider that hyperbolic and point out that "complete" and "serves only as" are contradictory.)
It's fine to surround yourself with "good people," who I presume are people that are Good-aligned, but that's never going to reveal systemic weaknesses or flaws in your code; you're just going to end up as another group of people that relies on black hats to point out where your code was flawed.
In other words, this entire post feels like thinly veiled positive thinking in excess. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo for a much better summary of the problem.
>This is the kind of thinking that lets people write bad code. "Unreasonable" is subjective here and lets people be very thin-skinned and defensive about their code.
Indeed, in my experience the very best producers are those who are toughest on themselves. No one is ever likely to be as insulting to me as I am to myself when I catch a mistake. Which is part of the reason for what neilk wrote above: "Some of the biggest jerks are also the best contributors." Because they are tough on themselves and their own work and are less willing to help others lie to themselves about what they have produced.
Assholes in open source != condemnation of the person. Most of us remember when we were young newbies, just getting started writing code. The problem is that people cannot take criticism well because they are thin-skinned and used to people praising them.
Is being a jerk strongly correlated with skill of any kind?
Or are the jerky-but-competent driving away some nice-but-competent people?
Is jerkiness strongly correlated with being motivated to contribute to open source? Perhaps for these people, their lack of social skills means their career is somewhat stunted.
Is there something about bad behavior, exhibited by a skilled or high-status person, that is more infective of community values than good behavior? Thus the former tend to dominate, as everybody else adopts the asshole attitude? I've seen this in at least two OSS communities.