Re:John Carmack: “I just dumped the C++ server I wrote for a...
by striking on Wednesday March 18, 2015 @10:28AM
(#9225676)
People don't just tolerate him for being negative, because he's really not all that negative. He's helpful if people actually need help. However, if he trusts you to not be stupid, and you break his trust, he's going to get mad.
He needs to be able to trust people because he needs to merge thousands of patches and make sure nothing bad gets in.
This is the only reason you should ever do what Jobs or Torvalds have done: trust.
I just think that his abrasiveness (even if it only manifests itself in a few circumstances) is a negative that people tolerate because he is such an exceptional project manager and programmer. The keyword is 'tolerate'.
Too often, people think that his success comes not from his technical mastery (which is very difficult to imitate) but from aggressive rants and call outs - and try to imitate those and justify it as 'well that's how Linus runs the kernel'. It's even more prevalent with people cargo culting Steve Jobs' personality flaws thinking it will make their company the next apple.