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.
