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Comment by ivraatiems | Hacker News Reader

> You can't have a complex technical project that is successful without some minimum level of competency. For better or worse, competency often makes people a little rougher around the edges.

This is just nonsense. Plenty of intelligent and capable people are perfectly friendly and non-toxic.

Your philosophy demonstrably doesn't work. Its failures are so obvious that even Linus Torvalds, who people always seem to bring up in these conversations, has repudiated it[0].

> And, in fact, some people contribute a _negative_ amount overall. Which is to say, the project is better off without their participation.

This is true. Toxic people aren't worth the effort to keep them in, no matter how good their skilled contributions are. There can and should be a way to remove them.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/09/linus-torvalds-apolo...

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"Toxic people aren't worth the effort to keep them in, no matter how good their skilled contributions are. There can and should be a way to remove them."

This is your utopian ideal - it is NOT indicative of the real world. Sometimes, there are horribly toxic people who are so competent and requisite to a project that their removal would cause immediate and irrecoverable failure.

You made your statement as matter of fact - it is absolutely wrong. There may be times, perhaps even a majority of times that you can simply remove a toxic person - but to state it as the hard rule without exceptions is wrong.

I'd call my statement an opinion, not a fact, but we can add an "In general," in front of what I said and note that there'll be exceptions from certain standpoints.

I think those exceptions are very limited, though. There seems to be an implicit judgment here that the success of the project is usually more valuable than the well-being of the people who are helping to complete it, and in the vast majority cases of I disagree. Unless literal life and death are on the line, it's hard for me to see it as worth it.

As an individual, my rule is pretty hard and fast and that's why I phrased it so definitively. I don't really care how much money is being offered to me or how cool or important the project is, and I don't really care how critical the person is to the project. If the choice is "allow the toxic person to be toxic or allow the project to fail," I'll vote with my feet and I'll leave.

Given the context, I suspect the parent was referring to the overhead caused by managing incompetents. Given the choice between working with an asshat who knows what they're doing and a moron who doesn't understand the basics _and can't be taught_, which would you take?

I assume in the open source world the latter is easier to ignore, but in business it can take years to get rid of an incompetent, and the longer they're there, the greater the drag on the team and the harder it is to hang on to talented people. By contrast, letting a talented and productive asshat go is much easier; just introduce them to HR!

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