So for people who are new to the "Rants" category, posts in the aforementioned category are usually me blowing off some steam.
These are usually fairly harmless, just a nice way to highlight some of the oddities of my day/week/month/life.
Now this rant by a former Ruby on Rails developer really takes the cake. Rock on! I have no stance on Ruby – it’s really outside my area of expertise – so I have no bias, but I do have a few friends in similar types of communities and I hear a lot of these types of things quite often.
After I read the rant, it got me thinking about the IT industry in general. When you hire people to write code or work on complex problems, you’re asking (usually) for gifted bright people.
Perhaps that is why those people are usually more tenuous than in other industries? In essence, because the people you want to hire are smart and intelligent they naturally argue more. They are more passionate and more actuated. This lends itself to conflict – Interpersonal conflict – especially if people don’t have good communication skills.
From what I can gather, people working on open source projects are even more likely to spark heated debates and arguments. They have more on the line – they work on projects because they *want* to. It’s their life and livelihood at stake, so they take a lot of personal ownership and seem to attach far more of an emotional investiture.
Of course I could be barking mad. I’ve only worked in the IT, Government and Retail sectors, so I don’t have a lot to compare it against.
What do you think? Oh, and while we’re on the topic.. do you think his post (rant) was a career killing manouver?
