On 9/2/19 10:25 PM, Adam Roach wrote:
On 9/2/19 8:55 PM, Keith Moore wrote:
Rather I think we need to try harder to understand those whose "tone"
is harder to deal with, because quite often those people are the ones
who have rare and valuable insight.
There's an increasing recognition within the software development
industry that extremely smart people who are rough around the edges in
the way you describe ultimately cause more harm to an organization
than their contributions help.
I think we're talking about very different kinds of people here, though
of course it's hard to tell because "tone" is so vague.
I've seen evidence of such increasing "recognition" too, at least in the
form of articles on LinkedIn. One of the things that disturbs me about
such article is that there is often a chorus of response that are
somewhat of the form "yes, smart people really do get in the way, and we
need to get rid of them". But there's a lot of difference between
"smart people" and "people whose tone someone doesn't like" so I don't
think it's appropriate to lump them in the same pile.
But because it may be the case that some people are thinking of "smart
people", as people who use inappropriate "tone", I would like to drill
down a bit further:
I don't think the issue is intelligence, mostly. I think the issue is
whether someone can see things from multiple points of view and is
capable of compromise. There are intelligent people are are good at
those things. And there are intelligent people who simply cannot see
things from any other point of view and for whom no compromise will ever
be acceptable. So I think intelligence and ability to work toward
compromise are orthogonal.
There are some rather famous examples of the latter kind of person, who
have made extremely valuable contributions to networking and/or computer
science. But offhand I can't think of any who have been successful in
a consensus-based standards organization. I suspect that an intelligent
person who can see things from multiple points of view and is willing to
work toward seeing how to build a compromise can still be successful in
IETF - or at least could do well in the IETF of several years ago (not
sure about today). On the other hand, someone who couldn't see the
merits in other points of view and/or wasn't willing to compromise,
probably wouldn't have ever felt successful or useful in IETF, and
probably abandoned trying to work here fairly quickly. So in summary,
I don't think IETF has had too many problems with the kind of
intelligent person who can't compromise.
But there is yet another phenomenon that is part of this picture, which
is that some people are hostile to and prejudiced against people who are
intelligent. And culturally speaking, at least in the US (can't speak
for elsewhere), there has been a widespread backlash against intelligent
people. This has certainly had a profound effect on US politics, at
least. Looking at the spate of articles (such as those you cited) of
the form "intelligent people bad", it's hard to not wonder if that's
part of the same trend.
In case it's not clear, I don't think that prejudice against intelligent
people, or against people with different views (who might or might not
be more intelligent than average) has any place in IETF, and I hope
you're not suggesting that it does. Quite the contrary, IETF
decision-making needs to be informed by a wide variety of views, and
emphatically not (for example) just the views or large corporations that
are trying to own a piece of the "market". IETF needs outliers
(whether or not they're highly intelligent).
When you dig into the rationale, a lot of this thinking translates
directly to standards development. See
<https://www.google.com/search?q=toxic+rockstar+programmers> for a
nearly infinite number of articles that go into why these people need
-- for the sake of the organization -- to either learn to contribute
in a non-toxic fashion, or be shown the door.
Again, we really need to drill down past vague words like "toxic".
Quite honestly, I find your words in the subject message toxic, but I
don't think your contributions should be censored for that reason.
Keith
