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Comment by base698 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder. You look at someone like Linus that has created untold trillions of wealth and given a lot of that wealth away. Yet, there are also many very public asshole blow ups.

Are there counter examples of success like that which don't have a severe asshole at the epicenter? Carmack and Tim Sweeney?

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Steve Wozniak is absolutely brilliant and one of the most jovial souls a person will meet.

A guy like that, you wonder how he can even poop, not having a gram of asshole in his whole body.

Clearly, you don't need to be an asshole to be successful. But do you have to be near one?

When Jobs was right there next to him, his body 8% anus by mass, being asshole enough for ten ordinary men, how do we know whether Woz's success was due in part to Jobs' abrasive personality, or in spite of it? Didn't Jobs pull some dirty business tricks to cheat Woz out of some of his ownership?

> A guy like that, you wonder how he can even poop, not having a gram of asshole in his whole body.

[...]

> When Jobs was right there next to him, his body 8% anus by mass, being asshole enough for ten ordinary men

Normally, I wouldn't comment on something like this, but this phrasing is pure gold.

> how do we know whether Woz's success was due in part to Jobs' abrasive personality, or in spite of it? Didn't Jobs pull some dirty business tricks to cheat Woz out of some of his ownership?

There are a number of stories where it generally sounds like Jobs knew how to take advantage of Wozniak, e.g.:

"...The original deadline was met after Wozniak worked at Atari four nights straight, doing some additional designs while at his day job at Hewlett-Packard. This equated to a bonus of $5,000, which Jobs kept secret from Wozniak. Wozniak has stated he only received payment of $350..." [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakout_(video_game) ]

>You look at someone like Linus that has created untold trillions of wealth and given a lot of that wealth away.

That isn't incompatible with being an asshole. The open source community is famous for having many...let's say "abrasive" personalities. Different people value different things, and for some people that might not be money, but they can still be awful jerks.

Torvalds's "public blow ups" are not really about being an asshole though, it's just a playful style of communication. Maybe it shows more confidence and assertiveness, but that's not a bad thing.

I don't know about that. He's said some incredibly mean and offensive things. It is detrimental IMO. There is basically no way I would want to collaborate with him. You couldn't pay me to contribute to the Linux kernel, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. He gets away with it because the world has become very dependent on Linux.

And it isn't just him. His approach normalized that interaction approach in people who work on the Linux kernel and adjacent projects, and creates a whole field of people potential collaborators don't want to interact with.

I got put off trying to improve Linux very early on when I tried to get help with a simple configuration issue in IRC and instead got dragged into a tedious debate about whether it's okay to call the OS "Linux" or "GNU/Linux." Ain't nobody got time for that. Not when there is a whole world of other projects one can choose to donate one's time to.

To be far, the "GNU/Linux" thing is a Stallmanism that is the exact opposite of Linus, who's pretty much the antithesis of pedantry.

His thing is being "mean and offensive" to the inner circle of kernel maintainers, not to random contributors. It's all about not being collectively wishy-washy, and making it clear what is expected of that inner circle. Some people might call it a bit unprofessional and be bothered by that kind of style, but many are clearly fine with it.

But that's the classic defense for asshole behavior in the workplace (or, in this case, the collaborative space). Are many "clear fine with it", or is it just accepted as what you had to put up with to operate in that space? And, as the center of that space, was Linus's behavior and attitude setting expectations about how people should act if they wanted to participate, and consequently what people just had to deal with as "the culture"?

To go back to Jobs, obviously many people worked with him and he had his inner circle. Was everyone fine with him being an asshole, or did they just put up with it because he's the boss and that's what you had to deal with if you wanted to work at Apple?

Would you work for an employer who acted that way?

The problem is it really doesn't read that way in text to a lot of readers (I also suspect there's a culture gap; there's a stereotype about Scandinavian communication being gruff and blunt relative to other European customs).

> Carmack

If you can look past the sweatshop work environment.

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