I hate to admit this, but I feel the same way when it comes to programmers themselves.
I've tried very, very hard to be mindful of this in an effort to correct it, but I still have this gut feeling when I encounter a fellow programmer with the general put-together-ness of someone in the C-suite.
What makes it worse is that I've had this gut feeling validated several times in the past. I once worked with a very cover-of-GQ programmer who, after ten+ years in the industry, would struggle with FizzBuzz-esque problems.
Nor a sysadmin that isn't wearing black, running Linux and/or listening to metal. Unless they have a white beard, then you know they have been around for a while.
(Just partially serious here, don't read too much into it. But you know it's true.)
So please, please don't judge a book by it's cover. Actions speak louder.
Suits don't set off my bullshit detector. Legitimate hackers have had to wear them since the dawn of computing.
The devil is in the details. Alarm bells start to ring for me when the sum of the details exceeds what my gut feels is reasonable.
Being worthy of the cover of GQ takes a ton of time, energy, and resources to maintain.
Managing to maintain the same perfect tan all year is an investment for sure, but not necessarily an investment that aligns with the hacker ethos.
Was it a tailored suit by a designer brand? Alternatively, was it a fancy bespoke suit?
Suits usually don't set off my bullshit detector. Many legitimate hackers have had to wear them since the dawn of computing.
It's the details that catch my eye.
The money, priorities, and (most import of all!) time are in the details.
After getting burned by that a few times, I learned that the only way to deal with it was to ensure that those who run a project will be able to justify putting time into it when the actual realities and responsibilities of life like career, family, children etc start raining down.
Its all fun and games when you are in college or fresh out of college and maintaining an open source project. But the time and effort put into it suddenly becomes difficult to justify when you have more responsibilities at work, or even further, a family to which you have to justify spending that time on that project.
Now, the assumption of open source community is that, when that happens, someone else will take over the project and it will just keep going on.
Except it rarely happens except for very large projects. The net is filled with abandoned projects. And even when someone takes over the project, there is no guarantee that the original vision and quality will be kept.
So its much better to make sure that every open source project has a way to fund itself and its developers by making money in some way.
But agreed, many forget certain programs/tools/etc don't need to be actively to be updated once they just "work". Unless it's been rewritten in Rust, or if it's slightly older Go ;-).