This isn't restricted to open source project leaders, or even open source developers. You'll find the same childish elitism in pretty much every field of human endeavor.
Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it.
The interesting thing is watching which members of a given group behave this way.
It's not everybody. There's a certain skill range where you find this behavior. Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better than most people I know", and it grows exponentially in that range (though, again, only in people who are given to such behavior).
But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.
I live in the climbing mecca of Fontainebleau, and can watch first hand as 7a boulderers from around the world descend and act like jackasses trying to scootch their butts off the ground on problems that are hard (but not world class) while scowling with superiority at the lowly rabble that might dare touch the holds of their project. It's best to simply wait until they give up before going over and doing the problem.
But occasionally you see a guy working an 8a. That's pretty stout by anybody's definition (even at font), but he's not shouting or swearing at it. He's just calmly doing his thing, uninterested in being the center of attention, and more than happy to talk to anybody who walks up without the least hint of snoot.
I think you find the computer programming equivalent of that guy from time to time too. He's the "bourne shell" guy that another comment mentions downthread, and he's above the elite.
The cool thing is that you don't have to be as good as him to act like him. All you need do is not be a dick.
I think it has to do with the level of mastery. At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.
I know that I now love teaching bash shell and C. I know that I am not the most talented shell guru or C programmer, but a lot of my knowledge now comes from answering questions from beginners that I hadn't previously considered (in bash, e.g., how can I tell within a script if the standard input comes from a keyboard or a file, or in C why don't you require the argument to return to be in brackets?) Questions that aren't necessarily hard, but that I hadn't asked when I was learning and now need to figure out the answer to on-the-fly. I now love teaching beginners because there's going to be the chance that they ask a really interesting question and I'm going to learn something myself.
10 years ago I would have hated that, because I wasn't comfortable in admitting what I didn't know - partly because I was still finding out that I didn't know things on a daily basis. Learning has now become a delight, rather than something to be achieved to get to the next thing.
I had the opportunity a few years back to work with Jeremy McGrath (many time motocross/supercross world champion) on a commercial shoot he did at our local motocross track. He was modest and pleasant to talk to. He treated me as just another rider, despite the obvious difference in our skill levels.
I also later had a chance to meet Jean Sebastien Roy, a slightly less famous but still top level rider, when he came to do a promotion for KTM. You'd never know from either of them how good they were until you actually saw them ride.
This contrasts heavily with some of the "experts" I ride with every weekend during the summer. I once had a competitor refuse to shake my hand and scoff at my attempts to introduce myself. It is a huge difference in attitude.
By the way, hello HN crowd. I've been a daily reader for several months but never found a topic where I felt I had something useful to post. I hope this has been relevant and useful.
P.S. I ended up beating the guy who wouldn't shake my hand, which gave me a petty feeling of satisfaction. Childish, perhaps, but I'm not perfect.
Sounds to me you became really good at explaining. And skill in explaining stuff is a much better predictor of not-being-a-jerk than mastery of anything in general.
It's pretty difficult to explain things well and be a jerk at the same time!
(although my pope-hat's off to those that manage to do both ;) )
>At some point, when you become really good at something (almost anything), you realise that a lot of your own knowledge now comes from explaining the basics to people who don't know anything. By forcing yourself to redo the basics, you get fresh insight on a level that someone new to whatever activity simply can't appreciate because they don't have X years experience with which to consider things.
I'm not sure it works that way. I'm very good at one or two things myself, but I don't really find that any additional knowledge now cames to me from explaining the basics to newcomers.
Rather, it's one of these (depending on the person):
1) when you become really good, you realise how much you still don't know, so you don't find it insulting of hilarious that other people don't know even the basis...
2) people motivated and devoted enough to get really good don't really care for the politics and the elitism anyway. They just care about the subject matter, and have no problem explaining it to a newb (and some love their field so much, you can't get them to STOP explaining it!).
I had the same experience in the dance world. I was privileged enough to be able to train with national and world champions. At the lower end of that scale, people were incredibly full of themselves.
Work with somebody who's recognized world wide? She's the nicest person ever. (Even though I clearly wasn't as good as she'd have liked me to be ;)
It's inspiring to work with people who don't have anything to prove to you, but have more than enough to show you.
Yes, this is because the experts don't feel threatened by noobs. They know they are actually experts, so they don't need to stoop to the level of picking on noobs to make them selves feel like experts. It's the "nervous middle classes" that feel a need to pick on noobs to reassure themselves.
PG wrote an article that describes this same phenomenon vis-a-vis nerds and popular kids in school:
If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.
Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better
than most people I know" [...] [b]ut there it stops.
I don't believe it's necessarily true. It has more to do with how they think they are perceived. Look at Kobe Bryant, one of the best basketball players to ever live. I've seen videos where someone will challenge him, "I'll get 2 before you get 10". Kobe takes that as disrespect. This person doesn't realize how good he is. He then goes on to dominate the 1-on-1, aggressively trash talking throughout. Try upsetting a doctor by calling him/her "mister"/"miss" repeatedly.
Some surgeons (who, these days, happen to hold the degree of MD) still find the "mister" thing respectful of their specialty. Sure, it may be a hangover from a time long past when surgeons usually weren't qualified physicians, but now it signifies that you understand they aren't "mere" GPs/physicians attending. (Interesting note only, not a rebuttal.)
there might also be an element of countersignaling [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countersignaling] involved - the real experts prove that they are not "nervous middle classes" by actively being nicer.
These nervous middle classes who aren't experts in anything more complex than "fizz without the buzz" often rise to project manager status by taking out the existing leaders. These are the "open source project leaders" who engage in backslagging, usually indirectly, e.g. telling their clueless minions that so-and-so represents a threat to revenue and perhaps someone should "earn another stripe for their hacker colors by putting a dent in this problem".
The funniest thing is that they tend to rise, rise some more, until they reach a level that they're not really skilled enough for, and that's where their career plateaus. In case you wonder how all the incapable people end up there.
Yeah, there's a theory that people tend to get promoted to their level of incompetence.
Also related is the "Dilbert Effect" where the incompetent get promoted to management so they can't screw everything up by doing actual work, so they get to just have meetings instead, while the competent workers continue working away.
The humblest, nicest, friendliest instructor I've ever had - in MMA-style kickboxing, generally a pretty macho area - was the one with multiple world championship belts.
I've been in the dance world years ago, and I knew several champions. They were all very nice. I suspect that being nice was a very large component of their success. For example, they were always willing to help out their rivals, cheer them on, etc.
> Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken.
You are. In the IRC channels I frequent, the purpose is one of (1) being social, or (2) being helpful. Some channels tolerate wilful ignorance/trolls less than others though.
Of course, there might be other channels with nastier cultures, but the sole purpose of IRC is not to be nasty to noobs.
Although the channels are meant for discussion about standard C/C++, in IRC it seems that many people actually try to master the standards of these languages and use that as a weapon to mock other people. It really feels like that at times. And it's understandable though - a question for which the answer can't be found in the language standard is off-topic. In such environment and "culture" it's inevitable that people start raging after the third "What is the best IDE/I mixed pointers and arrays and why not work they should be the same, no?" question for the day. At some point you just wish to kick these people off the channel the moment they voice their presence.
I can totally see why this would not be a case in a channel related to Haskell or Clojure where talking about anything related to the language is the point, rather than the point being the language standard.
I went through this phase as a climber (fortunately it preceded my career as a programmer, so I learned my lesson), and I've gotten over myself, and realized that no matter what I do, there are scores of people who are better, and more humble.
Also I am rather jealous you live in Fountainbleau. Very.
You bring up a point that is interesting to me. Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are?
It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't. Woe to me if I am ever the best at anything, I'm sure I'd be a paragon of intolerance for my lessers.
And yet, some of the smartest people I know, people who very well know their own ability, are the among the kindest people I know.
On the flipside, I know some "less gifted" people that are equally as kind.
> Why does it matter to our own humility if there exist people that are better/smarter/abler than we are?
They're competition.
On the one hand, you compete against them and how well you do will determine your life path. On the other, if you don't have any competition ... that's an even worse outcome, since you might be moving on a fruitless path in the wrong direction.
> It does matter to me, but I feel it shouldn't.
Well, to be perfectly blunt, that's the definition of insecurity. In other words, you're concerned you might lose the competition in some way or another. Money, social standing, happiness, you name it.
Everybody is secure and insecure in their own ways. For example, just using myself as an example ... I don't care if you're a better coder than me, but it'll bother me if you know more about how a kernel functions and works. I know or at least I think I know, very little about how kernels work. It might be true, it might be untrue, but that's how I feel. Would fixing that really change anything for me? Probably not. It's not directly applicable to my work. Which is why I don't do anything about that, it would be a waste of my time and I don't think I would enjoy it. But it's a "weak spot", so my mind dwells on it. Well, dwells on it is a bit much. Maybe passing thoughts when the subject comes up?
From my experience as a climber[1], it has to do with my own comfort level, and feeling the need to compare myself to others. When I judged others as n00bs, or weaker than I was, it was done mostly to make myself feel better about myself. I came to conclusions that rather than comparing myself to people who couldn't climb as hard (and being motivated to remain "better" than them), it was more beneficial (both for my motivation and my attitude) to rather compare myself to people better. I had no delusions of being better than these folks, and it helped me understand my own weaknesses. So, humility matters, because I know I likely won't climb 8b without ditching my job. I can push myself, but it's done from the perspective of "wow, I have so much room to improve" rather than "I need to be stronger than all these weaker people."
[1] I am probably an "above average" climber, having done 7c+ problems here in the States.
> But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.
That's what you want to believe. But really what sort of magical transformation do you suppose will happen once you cross that threshold? Why would a personality change?
No, what I think happens is this: A person with sufficiently high skill, better than anyone else and generally known to be, will get sufficient recognition and awe that they don't need to establish their rank in the pecking order. However, take away the recognition, and also a highly skilled person inclined to jerk-behaviour will again start kicking the lower ranks.
Some people are jerks. In some situations jerk-behaviour is more likely to surface than in others. But being extremely good at something does not necessarily improve one's personality. There's a difference between "I don't want to be a jerk" and "I don't need to be a jerk". The former is the better person.
Unsure if anyone will still read this, but I had another thought on this matter.
It occurs to me that you actually see highly-skilled jerks quite a lot. They piss and moan and kick and often aren't very successful, even if they're highly skilled.
Even if someone's highly skilled in some area, if they're being a jerk we're going to value that skill lower, anyway. Even though, if you'd stop and think about it, social skills are usually not related to being extremely highly skilled in some other area.
Being successful is usually a matter of luck and/or social skills. If you're extremely highly skilled and successful, you're going to be known as one of the positive examples of highly skilled people in this thread. If you're skilled, but either unlucky and/or a jerk, your skill won't be valued for what it really is capable of (unless, again, you're lucky), and you won't be noticed. Confirmation bias does the rest.
I think that everyone who has ambition hits this at some point. There comes a point in time where your domain knowledge lets you speak or act authoritatively with little or no preparation for most things.
The natural tendency at this point is to think "Yup, I'm a just a smart mofo" and pat yourself on the back. The key to moving up the chain of expertise/etc is to transcend that tendency. Humility is a skill, because you need to be willing to leave your comfort zone and listen to people.
Especially in "developed tastes" where you suddenly can't stand "inferior"
* music
* typography
* movies
* food
* wine
* art
* fashion
And so on and so forth. Of course, there is always someone out there who is better than you with better tastes, and people sometimes forget to see this as a humbling fact.
As insightful as it is, I think empty-quoting xkcd is not really conducive to an intelligent discussion.
It makes sense on reddit where people aren't encouraged to a one-track threaded discussion, but less so here where the discussion manages to flow pretty well at times.
Big part of it is if person is an expert but does things where he IS a noob. I am an expert in some things but I am a noob climber, very average runner
People who feel need to pick on noobs who actually trying to learn are scum. There are noobs that do not want to learn or absorb new things, yeah torture them if you want. but if someone is genuinely working on something and you put them down..
As a noob climber I can see the jerk types, not because they pick on me (I am so horrible that I am not worth the time) but because of how they get people react in two different ways. Some kiss their ass and other just exclude them (silence when they start talking to their peers working on a problem, people need to leave etc)
I believe more often than not, it is the humility that enables world class masters, not the other way round. Usually when people think they have nothing more to learn, they stop learning...
I wonder where do you take your experience from. I do pretty much all of what you described and while yes, there are definitely jerks around, there is no correlation between the level and jerkness. Maybe it's just hard to become "the best" while being a jerk, although I know quite a few world class climbers who are jerks and the best and who are humble dudes and the best.
In fact, we use IRC a lot for PyPy development and I think we're trying to be welcoming to other people, especially the newcomers, but then again, it's a self-judgement.
What I've seen correlation is the age (although there is definitely no rule here either). Typically, while you're being 16 and you climb say 7B, you think you're the best and you look from above towards people who climb 7As. And there are some people climbing 8Bs I know who are as bad as when they were 16.
>But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.
I'm not so sure. Consider Linus, Rob Pike, and others...
Programmers certainly do it. Laughing at noobs and being mean to them is pretty much the sole purpose of IRC, unless I'm mistaken. Surfers do it. Climbers do it. I've even seen rocket scientists do it.
The interesting thing is watching which members of a given group behave this way.
It's not everybody. There's a certain skill range where you find this behavior. Generally it ranges between "reasonably good" and "better than most people I know", and it grows exponentially in that range (though, again, only in people who are given to such behavior).
But there it stops. Once you hit a threshold of "better than pretty much everybody in the world, even those who have dedicated their life to this stuff", you don't really see this sort of elitism anymore.
I live in the climbing mecca of Fontainebleau, and can watch first hand as 7a boulderers from around the world descend and act like jackasses trying to scootch their butts off the ground on problems that are hard (but not world class) while scowling with superiority at the lowly rabble that might dare touch the holds of their project. It's best to simply wait until they give up before going over and doing the problem.
But occasionally you see a guy working an 8a. That's pretty stout by anybody's definition (even at font), but he's not shouting or swearing at it. He's just calmly doing his thing, uninterested in being the center of attention, and more than happy to talk to anybody who walks up without the least hint of snoot.
I think you find the computer programming equivalent of that guy from time to time too. He's the "bourne shell" guy that another comment mentions downthread, and he's above the elite.
The cool thing is that you don't have to be as good as him to act like him. All you need do is not be a dick.