On the sickness of our community

I've known lots of humble programmers - in fact some of the best ones I've known are. You just don't notice them because they aren't screaming / broadcasting / grandstanding. Now marketing is great and necessary and valuable .. but it's not engineering skill. One guy I've known for years, I was at a mutual friends house, and the mutual friend says something like "x was the president of Apache" . I laugh and like no! Then I turn to x, and I go like, you're not. And he just laughs and says yes, I am.... I knew he had been contributing code to a lot of projects, but hey, we all like to code...

In general, people who a jerks with skill like to rationalize saying "it's just the way you have to be to be good at X". When, really, they're just jerks who are good at X. And we don't notice all the quiet humble people pushing things a long.

I know this because, especially in my younger years, I would say I was the jerk out of the three mentioned in my anecdote above. But I was never the most skilled. Had my moments, but not the most skilled.

Being a jerk vs humble often corresponds to fame and visibility, but not to actual skill.

How many here knew who Brian Fox was before shellshock? I doubt most of the code in GNU has been written by Stallman. Stallman is very useful as a spokesperson for free software - but that doesn't mean you have to be like him to make widely used libre software.