Too many elite programmers are total jerks!
Too many elite programmers are total jerks!
Also, there's the sociological fallacy of assuming the biggest jerk must be the most talented, when it may well be a façade to impress people. There are some talented jerks, but all the talent in the world doesn't matter if no one will work with you.
PS: Shout-out to Steve Kablink for being awesome.
no, this is not a hate comment, but a sad one, as rarely people ask why so many opensource projects are led by single person, and very rarely by more than 3 active developers. maybe it has to do with the fact that arrogant top-notch jerks also like to showoff as they expose narcissistic traits and opensource is a good venue to do so.
perhaps also because is difficult to argue with total jerk (have you tried). or convince him/her/they/them that your not-so-up-to-the-standard code is still worth, and that in reality most of the code running the world is a total mess (for various reasons) but still runs (for various reasons).
the gift to be able to work with nice people that also develop nice code is close to blessing.
Another aspect is that in a lot of disciplines, a certain level of maniacal persistence increases your chance of success. To take the "mythical" 10k hours to mastery, it's a lot easier to get to 10k hours if you're not spending time getting in 10k hours of socialisation.
I say this as someone who myself would much rather code than spend time socialising most days - it's certainly not meant to imply that everyone introvert or who spends most of their time coding are assholes (that'd implicate myself...), but that there's a level of correlation between being good and spending lots of time practising and not spending as much time thinking about social niceties, and not everyone manages to strike the right balance.
also there is great number of great people that are very great at coding and not so great at communicating with other people.
so what is emphasized here in my comment is that the kind of opensource project that is inclusive and led by s.o. who knows how to express empathy and has time to also be involved with other people is more valuable as a community effort.
not going into discussion whether openssl is better of with one single dev or not, whether sqlite3 is more important than a serenityos etc.