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Comment by ot | Hacker News Reader

Arrogance being one of the main criticisms in the article is a little ironic, coming from bcantrill.

As a long-time watcher and enjoyer of his presentations, he has a long history of building (often) superior products to the mainstream alternatives, and passionately explaining why they are superior. The alternatives still end up being more popular, and there is no denying that there's sometimes an air of "those fools with their eBPF, while we have dtrace/ZFS/zones/etc" which toes the line of arrogance.

I think it's pretty hard to have a career where you are constantly involved with software that is better technically, and have worse alternatives constantly "winning", and not be a little arrogant sometimes.

I think you're confusing arrogance with confidence. Directness and openness paired with underlying respect for others can reflect confidence, not arrogance.

Tackling difficult conversations or addressing challenges head on may be seen as "close to arrogance" but they are in fact a net positive for everyone.

He described his response to watching a video where Gelsinger behaved as if his own work at Intel consisted of interesting successes and the company's failings were due to other people. What's ahem ironic about okay I'm just going to stop

Definitely not a totally unfair criticism (though do keep in mind that I was not at an executive at Sun, whereas Gelsinger was Intel's CTO), but I did try to be forgiving of that as confidence. It was his line about NVIDIA that I felt to (well) over the line. You certainly won't find me saying that "AWS would be a fraction of its size if Oracle hadn't cancelled Sun's cloud initiative" or whatever the equivalent might be.

I appreciate your taking what was meant to be mostly a humorous comment in the spirit which was intended.

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