This post was sparked by an interesting post about Rails creator DHH. As such you may want to read it first; you can go there now, if you like. I’ll wait.
All done? Decided not to bother, confident that I would sum it up anyways? All right; you know best.
Daniel’s main point seems valid, to me. Being arrogant or opinionated is not necessarily going to make your software better; on the contrary, having great software gives you the luxury of acting however you please and people generally need to be content to put up with you.
Daniel mentioned in his post that the most famous geek icons known solely by a 3-letter acronym are all, generally, “blowhards.” This is pretty hard to dispute.
RMS, depending on your view of the “Free Software vs. Open Source” or “GNU/Linux vs. Linux” debates, is either a brilliant visionary or a certifiable nut. On the one hand, he asserts that if I value my freedom, I won’t “follow” Linus Torvalds (I wasn’t aware I was following him; at least, he hasn’t put out the restraining order yet, so I’m thinking I’m okay), I won’t use Sun’s implementation of Java, I will refer to the OS as “GNU/Linux”, etc, etc… On the other hand, the man freaking wrote emacs. He contributed large portions of gcc, make, he had the vision for the GNU project, the GPL, and it’s difficult to argue that Free or Open Source software would be where it is without his efforts and the efforts of many like minded hackers globally.
ESR…. Let’s not even get into how polarized people get about ESR. I think that it’s safe to say he’s made massive contributions to Open Source, at the very least on a (sub)cultural and a PR level. Yes, he’s also outspoken and possibly a bit of a nut himself. Point is, on some level his contributions outweigh the nuttiness (at least for many), so there you have it.
Linus, Linux’s benevolent dictator, while not usually referred to by an acronym, is arguably a bit of an arrogant chap himself; at least, if you hand-picked your Torvald’s quotes, you could probably make it appear as such.
The list could go on… readers can probably think of several more polarizing tech celebrities out there. In every case, I think you could argue three things:
- Their contributions to technology certainly outweigh their personality quirks, and they would likely be well known even if they were not outspoken.
- Given the previous point, they still would not be nearly as well known as they are if they were not also as outspoken as they are.
- On the other hand, it’s possible that they only accomplished what they did because of the way they’re wired.
The last point is what I find interesting. If you think (as I tend to) that Stallman is a bit extreme about the “Free as in Freedom” shtick, he makes a pretty easy target as a bit of a nutter. That being said, if he were not so extreme about his opinions… if he thought “Well, Free software would be nice but I guess it isn’t really that big of a deal…” — would he have bothered putting all the effort and zeal that he has into the GNU project? Not likely.
If Linus didn’t believe, before he started, that he could really write an operating system kernel that would work like UNIX, by himself, would he have started? Of course, the Linux kernel has been contributed to by thousands of others over time — the point is though, if Linus didn’t have the drive, and at least a little bit of hubris, would he have even started? Maybe. Maybe not.
DHH is criticized for thinking that his personal philosophy of web applications is the One True Way To Do It, and that everyone else can just go away and shut up about it. That being said, if he didn’t think that way, would Rails have ever been written? Or, having been written for his personal applications, would it have been released as a framework for the rest of the world to see and use? Probably not.
Without incredibly strong opinions about how something should be done, it’s not likely that anyone will devise or propose new or better ways to do things. Some people would call this quality passion or drive, while others would call it stubbornness, arrogance, or insanity.
I’m arguing that these are two sides of the same coin; if you are passionate enough to just go out and create something, some people are going to call you arrogant. If you aren’t at least opinionated enough to believe that your approach is the right way to do it (at least, a great way to do it), you probably aren’t going to bother. If you are bothering, you are probably that opinionated, and you’ll probably come out and say it, and face it — someone is going to think you’re an asshole.
That doesn’t mean you should try to be contrary. In Internet parlance, that’s called trolling, and if you start making contrary, argumentative, flamewar-inducing proclamations just for the sake of doing it, you wind up with a reputation like John Dvorak, a tech journalist who gets a lot of attention simply for trolling saying things he knows are going to be controversial.
As I think about this, I’d say it applies equally, at least in some measure, to blogs and writing in general. If you try to please everyone and not really offend anybody or say anything that would bother this or that group… well, for starters, you’ll never be saying what you really think, and if you aren’t saying what you really think, it shows. It lacks the passion and vitality that makes a blog post or an essay interesting.
Witness the much-linked post by Zed Shaw: Programmers Need To Learn Statistics Or I Will Kill Them All. Well. That doesn’t leave much doubt what Zed thinks about the subject, does it? Sure to offend some? Probably. Interesting to read? Heck yes.
My point is, if Zed had just written, “Why Statistics Is A Useful Subject For Programmers,” or “Gee, I wish coders paid attention to stats,” his post would not have gotten nearly as much attention.
I didn’t really mean to transition to talking about getting blog traffic, but the main idea is the same. Without the zeal that is going to make some people call you a fool, a jerk, a loudmouth, or a lunatic, you probably going to be doing anything remarkable. Hope that doesn’t sound harsh; I’m including myself in that blanket observation, as well.
To sum it up: go out and get something done, and if someone gets pissed off, so be it. You don’t go out with the purpose of pissing people off, but at the same time, if no one is getting pissed off at you, you probably aren’t making any waves.
And a last disclaimer: the “We” in the title is a generalization, of course. I don’t hate any of the folks I spoke about, and like most of the rest of the tech world, don’t really know them except via a bunch of soundbites, and their work. And their work speaks for itself, which was the point of this whole little essay.
