so you know how broken clocks are right twice a day? well this is whatever idiom is necessary for "there's one thing ESR (the nazi programmer guy) wrote that I actually think is important to read". He wrote a letter to a young, brilliant, and oblivious Linus Torvalds.
I think about this every few years because I see the smaller, microscale version of it play out in a lot of my spaces: brilliant people, even among brilliant people, often get far ahead of the majority of everyone else in one topic.
to the point where they can't pass on the skills because they don't even necessarily know how to describe what they're doing, then burn out and we essentially "lose progress" for a few years as it's rebuilt. Because they're so productive that it's, in many ways, subtly detrimental.
but all the while they're evangelizing what they do, because they have the excitement and the charisma of someone enthusiastic and dedicated to their work, accidentally becoming impossibly load bearing, and their ability to teach cannot bring enough up to speed before they run out of steam and disappear from that space.
they aren't kind words (well. considering the author, it's positively diplomatic) but I hope this framing and pretext gets through.
I think about it because in many ways, the Linux ecosystem already grappled with this publicly, made successes and mistakes, and there's a lot that can be learned from that and generalized, because a lot of other smaller groups have these issues.
and if i hadn't given you the original source, I don't think you would have taken it as seriously as a project to learn from. 2000 is over twenty years ago, and I don't think enough people see it as the social project it was, instead categorizing it as extremely technical, which it was, but it required, essentially, partybuilding and party politics among people who were often amatures at both at best when they started.
And so far, your strategy has worked; your natural if relatively undisciplined ability has proved more than equal to the problems you have set it.That success predisposes you to relatively sloppy tactics like splitting drivers before you ought to and using your inbox as a patch queue.
But you make some of your more senior colleagues nervous. See, we've seen the curse of the gifted before. Some of us were those kids in college. We learned the hard way that the bill always comes due -- the scale of the problems always increases to a point where your native talent alone doesn't cut it any more. The smarter you are, the longer it takes to hit that crunch point -- and the harder the adjustment when you finally do. And we can see that you, poor damn genius that you are, are cruising for a serious bruising.
