[fosco]

Excuse typos from phone...A quote from Randy pausch (0) last lecture(1)

"And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.

(0)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Pausch

  (1)http://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/

[quickben]

Now imagine Randy continuing with his behaviour and you having that chat with him once every x months. After few of these, what would you tell Randy?

Imagine Randy worked for you, or under you on a project.

I've been on teams where people left quietly or loudly because of "Randies", going through the pains to change jobs.

Will you still have the same response for Randy?

[fosco]

the situation here is a mentor told this to Randy. In that context, this conversation probably has more of an effect. in any situation I think the lesson still applies, a person will be limited if they continue their behavior no matter how much success they have, they could have accomplished more if they had dropped the attitude problem.

[qb45]

You know, one can be a jerk when others don't actually deserve his accomplishments.

Also, jerk-circlejerk is a construct sometimes used as a protection from overly emotional people to actually get things done.

[babyrainbow]

Have no idea who the guy is but..

> it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life...

Sure. But the counter point is that it is also going to limit what you can learn (and hence achieve) if you are only willing to take lessons wrapped in fancy paper..

[davidgerard]

I'm sure Linus has a lot to learn that grsecurity could teach him. No, hold on.

[fosco]

the last lecture is a good lecture Randy Pausch gave after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at Carnegie Mellon University, check the video out, I first watched it while in college and found it inspirational

what my point was here, is in this situation I think it is difficult to argue if Linus (And our IT community at large) had more of an attitude like the 'Lucky Ten Thousand' [0] not only would I think that have a much more positive effect on our code, it would in all aspects of technology and culture. yes you can easily have success with arrogance (I certainly have the problem every once in awhile albeit I usually vent when alone not at others unless it was started by someone else) that is not the point, the success could have been bigger and better if people worked together. personally I would like to see true open source GNU/source-phone(pardon the name) installation on smartphones so we stop having to sell our souls to apple/google/other major player and see solutions like that could be obtained with more cooperation and well reasoned and calm debate rather than inflammatory remarks.

[0] https://www.xkcd.com/1053/

##this part is a rant and can be safely ignored. just to add one more note, compare reddit and HN. I think you will find people solving more complex issues and having more elegant solutions and discussion on here rather than Reddit... I find it is unfortunate that we sitll need to censor ourselves here because there are some topics that generate very emotional responses (my opinion) rather than being able to have constructive conversations, in order to keep the beauty we have here we have had to self sensor some topics and that makes me sad, I love this community and the discussions we have here, but if we cannot figure out a framework to have healthy debates about taboo topics, how can we expect others? I realize that is an elitest comment but there are a lot of smart people here and we still struggle.